Edit: I deleted my original response because I figured out why we're arguing.

"Free" is really a punk idea. It's a counterculture idea. "Steal this book" and all that. But ideas like that undergo a strange transformation when the power dynamics invert.

Graffiti is also a counterculture thing, a rebellious thing. But what would happen if the police started doing it? Imagine you go outside and see a couple cops spray painting "just say no to drugs!" on the side of your house? You confront them and they start spewing stuff about how "there is no property man! I should be free to express myself!" (Great comedy skit right there...)

The trouble is that hackers aren't rebels anymore. They aren't a counterculture. They've won.

So stop talking like a rebel, because you aren't one. You are a member of a super-privileged super-empowered super-educated upper class with tremendous opportunity and unbelievable power. With your ideas and gravitas you can raise more capital than most people can save over a working lifetime, and if your "startup" is successful you could find yourself with four houses and a private jet. With somewhat less effort you can command incomes that are twice the national average for a whole family and still have enough energy left over to hack on things "in your spare time" and debate politics on sites like this. You can, with a few "hacks," crash whole corporate systems and cost people millions upon millions of dollars all by yourself. If you know a bit about networks you can probably pull it off without being caught, maybe deflect the blame toward a third world dictator and create an international incident that captures global headlines... FROM YOUR BEDROOM.

You are upper class. You are rich and powerful -- far more powerful than the clueless geezers at the MPAA. I mean look... TPB gets taken down and six copies pop up in 24 hours. You can run circles around those morons because you're smarter, faster, ...

YOU ARE THE F'ING MAN.

You're not desperately struggling against the MPAA and the RIAA. Don't you get it? They're the ones desperately struggling against you, and it's a total rout. You are beating the living hell out of them.

"Steal this book" is punk, but "steal all the books" is tyranny. In the hands of "the man," piracy becomes a tool for crushing and beggaring labor, disempowering the consumer, and creating a surveillance dystopia by baiting users into passive surveillance-based content aggregators. It's as ridiculous as graffiti in the hands of the police.

You say "we" a lot. Let me tell you this. History will judge us on what we do with the awesome power we have been given.

I'm not defending the old record companies. We could do better. We could create systems that allow artists to sell their works directly to their customers with almost zero percent overhead -- 100% to the artist! Not only that, but we could create in that transaction a direct personal social link between artist and fan, a real relationship. That's so much better than the old model for everyone.

But no, we're building The Pirate Bay again, and again, and again, because we're cheap and we want free stuff. It's not just tyrannical and infantile. It's lame. It's not even technically interesting.