Countless Americans are happily 'stealing' intellectual property everyday from other Americans by accessing two websites — SciHub and LibGen — who owe their very existence to them being hosted in foreign countries with weak intellectual property protection and not being subject to US long-arm jurisdiction. Even on this website, using sites like archive.is (which would be illegal if they operated in the US) to bypass paywalls to access copyrighted material is common and rarely frowned upon. I doubt a culture of respecting copyright is as characteristic of "us" as you seem to think.