When you're 15 and poor, stealing seems pretty reasonable. When you're 30 and make stuff, it isn't.

Emotive language aside, if kids can't sample your wares at 15 will they buy them at 30? Back in my teens I went through a phase of taping music off the radio, and many of the same concerns were expressed by the music industry about cassette tapes as about downloads today; the same applies to videotapes. As I got older and had a bit more money available I spent a decent amount of it on records and books; in my 20s I became a pretty heavy media consumer, and probably spent >$5000 on CDs. This declined substantially during my 30s, although I think this was just a factor of getting older and not being so focused on music and socializing (I don't download music).

As Dantheman points out, copyright has given rise to some astonishingly poor legislation. As someone working in the arts (and who has had my IP ripped off in a serious way in the past), I strongly support the basic concept of copyright: of course I want to derive some benefit from my creative output, if there is any money to be had from its distribution.

But copyright holders have substantially abused this. Although I don't see it as an example of regulatory capture (because I think there is a legitimate property right in authorship), things like retroactive extension of copyright and the extremely anti-competitive behavior of the publishing industry have substantially undermined public respect for the underlying concept. Artificial limitation on supply and consequent price maintenance have gradually increased people's awareness of IP as a commodity. As a teen in the 80s I was aware of copyright and the idea of royalties, but like many people bought into the idea that they represented only a small part of the cost to the consumer: if I purchased a 7" single with a new song by my favorite band, my belief was that the cost was broken out approximately evenly between the retailer, distributor, packager, pressing plant, publisher, recording studio and the artist, all of whom were being compensated in proportion to their economic contribution. In actual fact, the creative and mechanical contributors were generally getting paid the smallest share, and the bulk of profits went to the parties with the strongest contractual position. This had been a perennial grumble of authors vs. publishers for years, but publishers had always had the argument that without their financial advances and distribution mechanisms, creatives and consumers would be unable to produce or obtain quality work. Technologically, this seemed to make sense: nothing I could achieve playing around with my cassette recorder could compare to the quality of a record or CD, and when it came to writing, the content I created and sometimes sold looked like nothing special as it emerged from my typewriter or dot matrix printer: only a publisher, it seemed, wielded the awesome financial muscle to command the appearance of my words in an actual magazine or book, where people would pay money to read it.

The internet, though, changed things in a number of ways. Interesting content was to be found all over, and on a computer your output looks no better or worse than mine, so the magical link between form and content was broken. Further, since the normal hierarchy of communication ('want to join the XYZ fanclub? Send your check to Big Publisher, 123 Business Street, Capital city!') was drastically flattened, it became possible to converse with and later meet established artists who were previously socially remote - in my case that meant people like Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, as well as various UK tech writers, for others the musical or visual artists they were fans of, and so on. And as the communication barriers melted away, it turned out that a majority of successful creative people didn't like their publishers very much and only received a pittance of what the fans were spending on their material. As time went by it became increasingly obvious that while technological change was making the means of production cheaper and more accessible, but the publishing industry wasn't passing those savings onto the consumer; if anything, prices were going up.

This is still the case in many fields: book publishing is fast approaching collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. Some years ago, Penguin books celebrated its 60th anniversary by producing 60 classic books by historical authors, for 60 pence (about $1) each - leading to some red faces when people asked why, if printing was in fact so cheap, they usually charged so much more. Indeed, I was in a bookshop the other day browsing through the history section, and was unable to think of a reason why I would want to pay $15-$20 for copies of the Federalist Papers or Homer's Odyssey - most of the purchase price is essentially back rent for the space the volume has been taking up in warehouses and on shelves. I'm even more uncertain why (some) publishers expect people to pay almost $10 for Kindle editions of works in the public domain.

Now, these technological changes came to a head during the 1990s. Near the beginning of the decade CD-ROMs and then CD writers became available, and after the initial wave of 'shovelware' musicians and programmers naturally began thinking that there really wasn't a whole lot of difference between a shiny disc pressed in a factory and one burned in the living room. Laser printers and WYSIWYG software had enough font and layout capability to make quite nice-looking printed matter, if only in black and white, and digital camcorders began to quietly revolutionize the film industry, by both killing the resale price for 16mm film cameras and allowing the possibility of no-budget movies which appealed to a younger audience. Technology continued to improve and as the end of the decade approached the idea of producing your very own book, album, or even a movie without spending a fortune was suddenly realistic, resulting in an avalanche of digital micro-publishing. There was a fair degree of copyright abuse too, but broadband was slow by today's standards and the 56k modem was still the interface of choice for most homeowners; internet piracy was inherently limited by the relatively slow rate of data transfer, but the writing was already on the wall for conventional publishers. And so, they seized the moment, and gave us...

...20 year copyright extensions, first within the EU and soon afterwards, the US. Rather than governments seeking to gain authority over private market activity in order to collect economic rents (the definition of regulatory capture), copyright holders exerted their economic muscle to persuade governments to extend the term and enforcement of title to intellectual property. Not only would holders continue to collect economic rents by not surrendering their IP into the public domain, but they would enjoy increased security and enforcement of said rents at public expense. As a result, (most) work created after 1923 won't enter the public domain until 2019 - assuming, of course, that copyright isn't extended again, since Mickey Mouse will probably be worth at least as much to Disney in 2023 as he is presently. Proponents of copyright extension have argued that as human lifespans have gotten longer, and that storage media have improved in quality, so too should the longevity of intellectual property - notwithstanding the facts that the rate of economic activity is independent of economic agents' lifespan (and indeed, that longer lifespans actually create deeper markets), and that the term of patents has remained fixed at 20 years without any noticeable dilution of or brake upon industrial innovation and economic growth.

Many advocates of strict IP enforcement (not you) erroneously employ the term 'stealing' to draw an analogy with the theft of tangible property, which act denies the property's use to the owner. The common formulation is 'how would you feel if someone stole your car - downloading movies is the same thing.' For those who adhere to such a view, I invite you to consider the same metaphor from the opposite perspective: a publisher parks their car in an empty, publicly owned parking lot, and rents it out to people for short drives. The law protects their ownership of the car and their right to exploit it for commercial gain - with the nominal understanding that one day, they will pay for their free use of the lot and the police protection that comes with it by allowing people to take free rides in the car. But in practice, not only do they never release their title to the car, they lay claim to ownership of the parking lot too, demanding that the public bear the costs of protecting their asset and that this situation should continue in perpetuity.

So - while I don't participate in media piracy nor endorse the concept, nor do I have a great deal of sympathy for the major economic stakeholders or the market distortions resulting from their attempts to extract endless rents. I am far more supportive of using public resources to enforce ownership rights in IP which is voluntary limited by the rights-holder in either span or scope (such as some creative commons or copyleft material).

Sorry for this lengthy screed - as you can see, this is an issue I feel strongly about.