Yes. Illegal redistribution violates the owner's copyright (in its absolute literal sense). While there may be no actual damages, a country might allow for statutory damages to be sought after. For example, the US allows for such statutory damages:
As much as your simplification sounds reasonable, if you dive down into the details, it falls apart.
Mark Rippetoe is a well respected strength coach in fitness circles. He may not be delivering Olympic-level athletes, but certainly good at delivering strength knowledge for the lay person.
"Ultra-high calorie diets" is a suggestion that needs to be taken in context. His focus is strength, not diet. Excess calories are required to gain muscle and strength, and for one of his target demographics, young skinny teens who lack muscle altogether, ultra-high calorie diets are exactly what they need. Obviously for heavily obese people this advice would not necessarily apply if their goals were to lose weight.
Regarding the supplement, don't judge things by the marketing fluff, but rather by what it actually does and its ingredients. DMAA is a well-known stimulant that does what a pre-workout supplement should do.
Eh, that's the same type of argument that could be made for exploiting vulnerable public APIs (pass in some query that isn't sanitized, etc.). I don't know the law surrounding those types of cases, but I would hazard to guess those get prosecuted rather hard.
>I failed to lose weight on a ~1200 kcal/day diet for several years of relatively active lifestyle. Does that seem impossible to you as well?
Yeah, I would think that's impossible. I'm going to just state user error as the leading cause here for your inability to lose weight. Unless you're completely unique in some shape or form such that reducing your caloric intake also reduced your BMR down to basically 0 (i.e. dead), I'm going to have to call bullshit.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/504