Outright theft isn't a legal technicallity.
Please, please,
please do not equate this to "theft". It is not. Theft involves depriving someone else of their property. No one is denying NCsoft the right to their intellectual property. Since they voluntarily shut down the game, they're not even denying them potential income. If anything, NCsoft is guilty of theft, because they
are denying us access to intellectual property that was created in good faith on their systems, for which we paid for that privilege.
At worst, this is infringement, and possibly violating a contract. It is
not theft. Using words like "theft" and "piracy" was invented by the media industry to make some minor offenses sound like major crimes. It is pure marketing.