The old way wasn't that different, really: you pay to see the movie, and in return you get to take a copy of it out of the theater with you, encoded in your brain with a highly abstract lossy codec.

When you rip rented movies you're just using a better codec and space-shifting the bits from your brain to your flash drive.

Personally I don't see a problem with it either way especially if you aren't distributing derived works.