Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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Not sure if you just worded it wrong or you're confusing piracy with copyright.
Anyway, piracy involves circumventing a protection system to get something for free instead of paying for it. DVDs for example not only contain copyrighted material, they also have copy protection systems to avoid unauthorized distribution, downloading is illegal as much as uploading since you're getting a copy on which the protection system has been broken on purpose.
Copyright violation, on the other hand, happens only if you publish something you didn't make without the authorization of the original author, so downloading copyrighted material - that doesn't have any protection system - is perfectly legal, uploading it is not.
I think their point was that there are countries where piracy (or circumventing copy protection) isn't illegal and only copyright laws exist. Thus downloading pirated stuff isn't inherently illegal.
In some countries the copy protection removal isn't dealt with in any way and thus it's not inherently forbidden, in some it's actually outright permitted by law in some situations. (personal use, education,..) Same applies to tools for copy protection circumvention.
Not being dealt with is not the same as not being illegal. I live in EU, piracy is illegal, as in there are laws against it, but noone will come after you if you (as a common citizen) download pirated movies or software.
As an EU 'common' citizen in Germany, I can assure you that you most certainly will be gone after for downloading any and all copyrighted material.
A single episode of a TV series once cost me 1500€ when I forgot to activate my VPN.