Is he now require to purchase the DVDs in order to legally watch it?
Not to view his own, prior recordings, no. Of course not. They were legally obtained. (Although the television industries are still attempting to find some way to prevent recording of live tv shows to a permanent medium...) If he were to download copies of those produced DVDs, then that would be piracy. If he were to share copies of his prior recordings with his friends, he is well withing his rights as long as he derived no compensation for them. it's not about making sense; it's about making legal sense.
Everything I can find either directly states or heavily implies that there must be deprivation of something tangible in order to actually classify as theft.
The legal system in the USA (and damn near every other country with reliable electricity), has established that intellectual property IS, legally, "property." If copying it deprives the copyright holder of potential financial gain, it is theft in the eyes of the law. Although it is important to note that it is a form of theft that law enforcement is utterly ineffective at dealing with, and thus extremely reluctant to involve themselves with, forcing most individuals who believe themselves to be damaged by it to seek recompense and/or justice in the civil courts. This means such instances are almost always referred to as "copyright infringement" rather than "theft" because an individual citizen can not prosecute another citizen for a criminal offense, only for a civil one.
Probably the biggest problem with the whole issue is that no one, not the police, not the government, not the industries involved, the public, the consumers, the justice system, the lawyers, no one can agree on what, exactly, it is, how to deal with it, or even how you COULD deal with it.
Which makes me think of a related conundrum. Do items that exist only as data have real world, legal "value?"
For instance, when legendary EVE Online super-villain "Bad Bobby" successfully defrauded an in-game corporation (their version of a guild) out of more than 850,000,000,000 ISK (their version of gold), was that "theft?" EVE is interesting in that ISK can be bought with real money without violating the TOS. You can buy PLEX (essentially 30-day game time cards) with real money and with in-game ISK, establishing a real-world exchange rate for ISK. At the time the scam went down, the .85 trillion ISK Bad Bobby made off with had a real-world cash value of $45,000 US. The ISK could (and likely was, there is little reason to suspect that Bobby, now the most infamous player in the entire game, would use that PLEX to keep his account going for more than 200 years...) be converted to PLEX, and that PLEX (remember it is acceptable in the EVE TOS to sell PLEX) then sold for real-world cash. Essentially Bad Bobby stole 45 grand worth of in-game money which he then certainly converted to cold, hard cash.
Was that theft? Did he take something of value? According to the law....nope, ISK had no legal status as a valued commodity. Does a World of Warcraft item that requires thousands of gold worth of materials and hundreds of hours to create have any intrinsic value? It's an interesting question. People pay money (wisely or not, I make no judgments) every day for downloaded items for games, many of them purely cosmetic. From the infamous horse armor in "Elder Scrolls Oblivion" to the vanity Batman skins for "Arkham City." (Which I will admit I bought myself in the Steam half price sale. Don't judge me, I had to have me some Old Batman violence.) Do these items, which have no actual existence, have value? Can you create value-tagged commodities without any actual resources?
A house has bricks and mortar and wood and wiring. There is a measurable expense in it's creation, a measurable collection of physical components with known, market-based values. Does a house in a game, which has no physical existence at all, also have "value?" There is certainly a market to base it on if it does. If that in-game house has value.....then would it be a crime to burn it down? Hell, for that matter time-investment has legal precedence as a value-adding factor.....if I spend weeks leveling a game character only to have my account hacked and the character deleted....can that be prosecuted as theft? Or is it just vandalism? Would the deletion of a two-hours-invested level 1 character be a lesser crime than the deletion of two-years-invested level 85? Would it be an 8760 times greater crime?
I feel as though it's directed at me.
Of course not, lass. The "you" I was using was a generic one. Rest assured the sandman knows how to have a conversation with a pretty young lady.
even though essentially everything is the same
It IS interesting that we draw distinctions between different TYPES of data. Music, movies, games, it's all just ones and zeros. If it's wrong to pirate one arrangement of binary, shouldn't it be wrong to pirate any arrangement?
obviously you want multiple copies of the music but you don't want to pay for all of them.
LOL no, I just want the one copy. I'm just too lazy to cart that one copy around with me. Although now that I got the new smartphone, that's not really an issue anymore, and since I buy most of my music in digital download format now, anyway, it's not really an issue. Now that I have it all in one easily portable format, I no longer see a need for copies in different locations.
I know our politicians do not want to even pretend to put that much effort in anything.
That's the problem. It's not a simple situation you can just throw a half-asses piece of legislation at. We're talking about an organization that put a guy who thought the internet was a "series of tubes" in charge of the committee on science and technology. They are utterly unwilling (or perhaps unable) to put in the effort necessary to really deal with this thorny problem.