Copyright infringement isn't theft.

Pirates do vote with their wallets -- they keep their wallets closed and don't support any players in the market. You seem to be of the opinion that supporting the least-evil companies will slowly shift the standard MO in the market towards less evil activities, but there's two problems: (1) This hasn't actually helped unseat the incumbent corporations, and (2) there's nobody who is sufficiently not-evil to the point where they are worth supporting.

This isn't a consumer-and-business problem. This is not something that can be fixed by improving consumer awareness. The problem isn't that consumers aren't making smart choices, the problem is that this market exists at all. Copyright was never meant to be abused this way, and our continued compliance towards the market and the corporations participating in it are not helping.

I'd like to make an analogy. Consider the bottled water market. This is a market which takes a free good (water) which is generally considered too cheap to meter, and sets a relatively outrageous price on it. The markup is justified through the packaging, quality assurance process, and a general insistence on part of the producer that the bottled water is somehow superior to non-bottled water.

What's the answer to bottled water? Supporting bottled water startups? Seeking out and raising awareness of disruptive bottled water producers? I'd say that the answer is simply to not buy bottled water.

At this point, you're gonna say that bottled water isn't a good analogy because piracy would equate to stealing pallets of bottled water. You're right; the analogy doesn't carry that far. Feel free to come up with a more accurate analogy.

(I'm gonna get US-specific at this point.)

Do you recognize this? "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." This is the clause of the Constitution which authorizes Congress to establish copyright. This is the only authority under which copyright may operate: It must be limited, it must be aimed at content creators, not merely redistributors or advertisers; it must promote common culture. The point of copyright, as we historically know, is to ensure that artists can make money without patronization, in order to permit an artist who continually makes work to be remunerated for that work. The idea of a limit on copyright was to ensure that the common culture, the public domain, which was considered more important than the right of an artist to be compensated, would not be ignored; anything which is published will eventually belong to everybody and not any single person or group.

Know how long copyright was originally? 14 years plus an optional 14-year renewal, if the author was still alive. That was in 1790, for the "encouragement of learning." It was intended for copyright to eventually shrink as distribution improved; after all, why would we need a long copyright when authors are nearly instantly remunerated in this age of speedy international distribution? And now copyright lasts longer than most people.

You and I, and everybody else, have minds filled with cultural information. It really should belong to all of us, shouldn't it? Isn't it a damn shame that Mickey Mouse, after three-quarters of a century, being a character our grandparents enjoyed, isn't somebody we can have? That the cultural contributions of John Coltrane aren't ours to enjoy? I'm not gonna keep listing things from the twentieth century which we all know but aren't available to us; there's just too much stuff and too little space in this tiny textarea.

So, in this space, who do you see as a disruptive or interesting player, and why? Who will you support with your wallet? Because I'm done. I'm tired of it.