This statement was made by Ubisoft's director of subscriptions, Phillipe Tremblay, who recently spoke to Gamesindustry.biz about the digital future and Ubisoft Plus specifically. Tremblay states that people eventually "got comfortable" with not owning their CD or DVD collections, and that a similar shift in attitude "needs to happen" in gamers.
If buying is owning, piracy is still not stealing. Theft involves a tangible loss for someone else.
Which is a shame, because if I could create tangible loss for Ubisoft by downloading their games, I would do nothing else until they went under.
According to their logic, you can set up a shellscript that repeatedly copies an ISO of theirs to /dev/null. That should bankrupt them after a week or so.
Where's that greentext with the guy who takes over a company by pirating their game 100k times?