Paying for a subscription earns companies money. Piracy causes companies to lose money.
By buying or subscribing to a product or service, you are not only getting access to the product or service, you are also supporting the company by voting with your wallet.
Therefore piracy is ethical and paying for a subscription is not ethical - if the company in question is a "bad" company that you wouldn't like to support for valid reasons.
The question is, do you value law or ethics more? I'll leave that up to you, there are valid reasons to choose either.
