not sure I get your point. So because a movie producer didn't sign a contract with a pirate it's okay for the pirate to copy the movie without compensation and that's the only difference?
To me, in both cases someone did some work that someone else wants. In both cases they should pay for that work. If they are not willing to pay the price the person who did the work is asking, then they should go get work from someone else. At no point should they just say "well, I never contracted with you so therefore making a copy of the work you did is totally cool"
I was talking about the definition of theft and whether what you did in your example constituted it.
If I did your taxes (as in: did all the calculations) and you took a picture of my results, copied the values, etc. no theft happened. If I filled out your tax return and you took that without paying then obviously theft happened, but I assumed you didn't mean that since then your example would have no connection to TFA.
What did happen, though, is exactly what you described: you asked someone to do work for you ("contracting"/"work for hire") and they did just that. Then you decided not to pay them, which is a simple civil law case of contract fulfillment.
EDIT: depending on the "creativity" of my tax calculations, copying them might be considered IP theft and I could come after you using the DMCA, but I guess creative accounting only goes so far ;)
To me, in both cases someone did some work that someone else wants. In both cases they should pay for that work. If they are not willing to pay the price the person who did the work is asking, then they should go get work from someone else. At no point should they just say "well, I never contracted with you so therefore making a copy of the work you did is totally cool"