"You know what? I would steal a car. If it was as easy as, like, touching the car and then 30 seconds later I own the car. And like, I would steal a car if by stealing the car, the person who owned the car they got to keep the car. And uh, I would also steal a car if no one I had ever met had ever bought a car before in their whole lives." -- Mindy Kaling

I had no idea who this person was so I searched her name. Apparently she grew up in Massachusetts, went to elite private schools, and became a Hollywood actress and writer. Somehow I have a hard time believing she had to pirate Photoshop just to barely scrape by at any point in her life.

In addition to being an actress and a writer, she's also a comedian. This is likely a joke making fun of a time when companies wanted to enforce draconian and disproportionate punishments for doing something fairly mundane.

As an engineer who grew up having to hone my skills using questionable software, I support this joke. If you're focusing on her background; you're focusing on the wrong thing.

See also: "Don't copy that floppy".

She didn't say she had to, or even that she did. She's just arguing that the analogy between software piracy and auto theft is specious, and she's right.

She also works for media studios who would see themselves as the poor victims of digital piracy. Instead of dismissing her viewpoint based on her status, maybe try addressing the point that stealing a car is actually not at all the same as copying software or digital media, and arguments that they really are equivalent miss the point and lead to pretty dumb laws.

Her most famous role was on The Office, which constituted a significant portion of Netflix's bandwidth (7% is one hand-wavy estimate based on related data), and Netflix has been estimated to have been an even more significant portion of worldwide Internet traffic (25% - 35% in some data). They're hand-wavy numbers but I would be confident that the show Mindy Kaling is best known for having written and acted in has easily made up over 1-2% of global Internet traffic at times. I wouldn't say she's entirely divorced from the issue of digital media piracy.

Also it's from a stand up comedy routine. It's okay to laugh in life.

I would if I could and, now apparently as cars are going to subscriptions for everything, I might eventually need warez for the car.

Cruising down the street with my sweet keygen music, thinking not everything that results because of proprietary software is evil.