With Bittorrent and the like, your usual garden variety piracy, you at least know who you're stealing from and you know that everyone involved is simply supplying bandwidth, information alone, and that no money is changing hands. If at any point in time you prefer to purchase a legitimate copy of what you have obtained, you are free to do so, and many people often do.
What Ebaum did was claim the content as their own and act as a gateway to it, in effect making a buck off of the piracy of others. Since the original creator is no longer known, there's no way to provide compensation even if you want to.
You cannot steal anything with Bittorrent. Stealing necessarily involves the previous owner being a previous owner, but Bittorrent and other copying methods don't remove the item from the owner.
Refusing to let someone get their files from a computer is more like stealing (though since the computer itself is rightfully owned by the new owners of ebaumsworld, it's certainly arguable that it's just rude, not stealing). A file is part of the computer it's on.
Downloading a file with bittorrent (lets assume a illegal one) is copyright infringement, which is illegal, and still a crime. One issue is that most copyright infringement cases these days are civil rather than criminal, but the criminal proceedings do exist.
I thought it was the other way round... If you ask me for a copy of Serenity, and i give it to you, then I have infringed on universal studio's copyright. You however have done nothing wrong, because unless you broke into my computer, you would be unable to make a copy without my consent.
Your way makes the whole internet ... broken. anybody can ask for anything, but the guy in control of the resource does not have to honor the request.
I should clarify: technically this is the case. However, it is technically illegal to purchase/receive stolen goods (and you can't really argue that you were under the impression that torrented files were legit, at least for the most common torrents).
I oversimplified because it is tiresome hearing the "But it's not stealing because you don't deprive them of anything" argument.
What Ebaum did was claim the content as their own and act as a gateway to it, in effect making a buck off of the piracy of others. Since the original creator is no longer known, there's no way to provide compensation even if you want to.