@Zod @Hitch. You both make very good points. My experience, like Zod's, is that most people don't bother with justifications at all.
However, it is a fact that copyright infringement is a very different legal concept to larceny. Copyright Infringement is quite literally not theft so far as the law is concerned. The question is whether the two are ethically equivalent or close to it.
I must confess that one of my pet hates is "rights holders" and publishers and the like continually hiding behind authors and other creators. Authors are of course entitled to be paid and should be paid. However, the fact is that it is almost invariably the case that the author is losing only a tiny amount from each lost sale compared to the other parties to the transaction. And, of course, time and time again we hear of publishers who have taken steps to cheat their authors even of these tiny payments. This does not of course in any way justify customers not paying the author. However, it is a dishonest and annoying tactic.
I want authors to be paid. If I were to download pirate copies of ebooks and read them without paying the author, I would be doing the wrong thing, full stop. Further, I believe that we should have intellectual property laws, though I think our current ones in many cases are working against the public interests they are meant to serve. When this happens these laws lose the respect of the public and I believe lead to more people regarding them as irrelevant.
The Free Dictionary defines the term rationalisation in this sense as follows:
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rationalisation - the cognitive process of making something seem consistent with or based on reason
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https://www.thefreedictionary.com/rationalisation
I don't think it follows that every copyright infringement is universally and without exception inconsistent with reason so that any justification whatsoever amounts to a rationalisation. Even more so if the question of whether something is consistent with reason is a subjective one and not an objective one.
Interestingly enough as far as I am aware Elsevier has made no claim that the authors of its articles are being deprived of payment by piracy. Perhaps this is because it does not in fact pay its authors? Though it does, of course, leverage the benefits of public research expenditure for its own enrichment.