Copyright was a way to give rightsholders incentive to do what they do, while still ensuring that the work enters the
public domain, which is and always has been the absolute endgame of copyright.
Today's copyright is much different, due to massive lobbying efforts by those who would benefit most. Authors life + what, 100 years or so, is way too long (and that's completely discounting those who would want copyright to be perpetual). So you have a situation where a person creates a work, a large rights owner buys it up, and then they get to milk all the benefits while preventing the public from having their rightful free access.
Restore copyright to 14+14 years (with a single exception, the original artist and only the original artist gets 28+14, if they sell their rights to the work then the recipient only gets 14+14). Destroy the DMCA. Those are the two most important things to restore copyright to a proper moral standing. Otherwise, copyright as it stands right now is immoral and unjust, and thus (some of) those who pirate are doing so for fully ethical reasons, and are on the better side of history in the long run.
Of course, some people just want free shit. However, those people will always exist no matter how reasonable copyright is. Hell, I don't mind getting free shit when I pirate something, even if I'm doing it for moral reasons.
Today's copyright is much different, due to massive lobbying efforts by those who would benefit most. Authors life + what, 100 years or so, is way too long (and that's completely discounting those who would want copyright to be perpetual). So you have a situation where a person creates a work, a large rights owner buys it up, and then they get to milk all the benefits while preventing the public from having their rightful free access.
Restore copyright to 14+14 years (with a single exception, the original artist and only the original artist gets 28+14, if they sell their rights to the work then the recipient only gets 14+14). Destroy the DMCA. Those are the two most important things to restore copyright to a proper moral standing. Otherwise, copyright as it stands right now is immoral and unjust, and thus (some of) those who pirate are doing so for fully ethical reasons, and are on the better side of history in the long run.
Of course, some people just want free shit. However, those people will always exist no matter how reasonable copyright is. Hell, I don't mind getting free shit when I pirate something, even if I'm doing it for moral reasons.