Selling used books is not comparable with putting an ebook on PirateBay. Lending books and returning them when you're done reading is also not comparable to putting an ebook on PirateBay. You also can't display the same painting in 2 museums unless one of them is just a cheap copy and people don't appreciate copies in museums.

All cases of "sharing" the "older media" you describe are subject to the laws of scarcity. Even xeroxing a book is subject to it, as the cost of that can be even higher than just buying the book; and is mostly done for technical references for which you can't find the original.

I think you might be missing my point. My point isn't that piracy doesn't exist, it does, my point is that sharing also exists and in the digital realm it is easily confused with piracy. A library allows a great number of people to read a book without any of them paying a dime to the author. In many ways it's fundamentally comparable to piracy, potentially hundreds of people a year can read a book while the author is only compensated for the purchase of a single book. However, we tolerate and indeed celebrate such things because we recognize that there is a tradeoff between the necessity of financial reward for creating art and the necessity of spreading the consumption of art by lowering the financial barriers to access.

However, while scarcity is intrinsic with physical goods it is not so with digital goods. Thus, when you translate an ordinary library into the digital realm without imposing artificial scarcity you get something that is fundamentally indistinguishable from pirate bay.

"people sharing" is a romantic notion; in a perfect world there would be no problem with it, but writing a book / creating a game / composing a song / creating a movie - takes time, lots of effort and monetary cost that can be quite substantial.

Would people create movies such as Avatar (in the interest of sharing) if the movie industry would go bankrupted? I doubt it. Would people donate money if movies were released for free? Sharing is all fine for people, as long as it doesn't cost them too much. But few people give away their work for free and even fewer do it for altruistic reasons (it's like "spending other people's money" - how can you not be fine with that?)

This is a false dichotomy. If all unregulated digital distribution were piracy then you would be correct, people would stop paying for goods that were available digitally and it would become difficult for more such things to be created, as creators would no longer be supported financially in doing so. However, that's not how things have played out. Avatar is a good example. It was almost certainly available online in clean, high-def versions while it was still in theaters and long before it was available on DVD. With just a few clicks and some waiting anyone of hundreds of millions of people could have downloaded and watched it, without paying James Cameron anything. And indeed many did. But none of this forestalled the massive financial success of the movie, both at the box office and in later DVD, blu-ray, and streaming sales.

This is not an isolated phenomenon. The ability to "pirate" digital media has been widely available and widely known for many years. And yet the music, movie, television, and book industries have not collapsed. Indeed, in the case of the movie industry it had a banner year in 2010. How can this be? There is no possible interpretation of the data which is compatible with the notion that huge numbers of people who engage in "piracy" are not also spending lots of money on media. Under the "all unregulated digital distribution is piracy" model this doesn't make sense. However, under the piracy + sharing model it not only makes perfect sense but is a predicted phenomenon of that model.

Despite this evidence that there is more to media "piracy" than just piracy many people refuse to accept it. But in order to proceed to a sane enforcement of laws and a healthy industry where content creators are rewarded for their creations we must see and acknowledge what is actually going on.

_the onus is on producers to figure that out_

And they have, with DRM and all that. Only problem with it is that it's a PITA for honest customers, but technology evolves and people always find ways to build better mouse-traps.

DRM very rarely works. DRM on movies, tv, and music does not work. Every example of DRM trying to impose artificial scarcity on these media has been utterly broken. It takes only a matter of seconds to begin downloading blu-ray rips. And yet despite this, as I've said, the industry still makes tons of money. Indeed, even when digital media is distributed without DRM (as is increasingly the case for music through Amazon MP3, iTunes, and other distributors) the world doesn't end, and artists still make money.

So the onus really is on all of us - if you don't like the current legal frameworks, think of something to reward the original authors; otherwise the situation is only going to get worse.

You seem to think that the situation has been getting worse, but it hasn't. In fact, the situation has been getting better. The lower costs and barriers of digital distribution, with or without DRM, has enabled artists to gain a higher share of the revenues of their work. And has enabled more artists to get into business who would otherwise have been too marginal to have been accepted into the industry. There are many examples now of artists giving away their work in exchange for variable donations (down to none), many of these have been hugely successful in generating revenue.

The problem we face today is not to find some desperate measure to divert us from the inevitable desolate wasteland of rampant piracy and starving artists. Rather, the problem we face is to acknowledge and accept the reality of digital goods and to come up with legal frameworks and business models which embrace the natural strengths of digital goods rather than denying them and pretending we can model this new media landscape by pasting a map of old media on top of it and changing a few of the labels.