The Internet, like DVD, VHS, cable, radio, and sheet music, is just the latest in a long line of transmission mediums.

Use of each medium to transmit work that was once locked down and overseen by a controlling influence has always been considered piracy when that medium was in its infancy -- right back to sheet music -- as Cory Doctorow notes in a video interview with the Guardian[1]:

"The copyright wars aren't new, of course. In the first part of the 20th century you had sheet music composers who represented the only real 'music industry'. They were an industry as a pose to a trade because they had an industrial apparatus; a copying machine that made sheet music. And so they could sell it even when they weren't there.

"Then you had performers who weren't really an industry; they were just a trade, because you could only make money as a performer if you were actually performing; there was no industrial component. And then someone invented recorded music, and the performers who were buying their sheet music down at Tin Pan Alley and performing it all these years started performing it into recording devices.

"And the composers said, 'What are you doing? You're selling our compositions without our permission! You must stop this -- it's an act of piracy!' And the performers said, somewhat understandably, 'You sold us the sheet music, didn't you? Didn't you think we'd perform it?' And different states came up with different answers, but at the end of the day, all the countries that made the transition to having a successful recorded music industry said that composers actually don't get a say in whether or not their music is recorded. They may get some money from an automatic royalty system, but you don't get to say 'this can only be performed here' or 'only that guy can perform it'. Once it's been performed once, everyone can perform it and everyone can record it, because that's how music is.

"So here you have the great pirates of the first decade of the 20th century: the music performers; the record labels. And the record labels turned around, not that long afterwards, and pointed at the radio stations and said, 'What are you doing playing our records on the radio? You have no business doing it! What we did when we took those compositions without permission, that was progress! What you jerks are doing... that's just piracy!' And, of course, the broadcasters went out and they said, 'no, you should let us broadcast' and they eventually won that fight and then they were the brave pirates who became the main stream.

"And so when cable channels started taking broadcast signals and pumping them over cable wires, the broadcasters said, 'Well, you know, when we took that music from the record labels that was progress, but when you take our radio diffusion and pump it down over a cable that's just piracy'. And the cable operators fought that fight.

"Then along came the VCR, which could record programmes off the cable, and the cable operators, having won the fight with the broadcasters, said, 'You know, when we took the broadcasts that was progress! When you take our cable transmissions and record them on a VHS cassette, that's piracy!"

"And then, the company that invented the VCR, Sony, joined with the major studios in suing the Internet for taking movies that had been diffused on DVD or VHS cassette or over the air and said, "You know, when we put your cable diffusion on a VHS cassette, that was progress, but when you take it and put it on the Internet, that's just piracy."

"The biggest difference now, I think, is the extent to which they're being taken seriously. I think it used to be true that no lawmaker believed he could be re-elected by breaking the thing that his constituents use to entertain themselves. And now there seems to be an awful willingness to go to Corfu with a music composer and come back and propose that the Internet should be censored and that people who are accused of file sharing should be locked out of it and so on. And I guess that's the major difference and the thing that gives me anxiety about the future of the Internet.

[1]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2011/may/30/in...