I'd like to add another point to the interesting points raised by wollff and the others, and this is one of focusing on the thing that is less subject to opinion: It doesn't matter the legality of piracy. In the not so distant future, friend-to-friend encrypted networks (e.g. freenet) will become mainstream, unless outlawed. (However I don't think they can be effectively outlawed without fundamentally turning upside-down the whole internet, which admitedly is a scary possibility).
Well, the tabula rasa aspect of it is that piracy is here to stay, and that markets must better take this into account instead of dreaming of solutions that will not be enforceable for long. Nobody thought in the past of outlawing the recording of songs from FM radio, because it's pointless in its face. IMHO, f2f will have to be accepted as a new form of publicity. Yes, the main difference with broadcast radio is that it was controlled by the broadcaster.
This obviously leads to the big question of what can be done for goods that can be easily reproduced in the digital era. DRM has the obvious drawback of making the pirated good more attractive than the legit one, so in the end this may be a no-go. I honestly cannot point yet to a plausible solution, albeit I have read some interesting suggestions like sponsorship by the masses.
Some argue that rampant piracy will be untenable for the majority of authors. Some retort to this that this will cause only the vocational and gifted creators to survive (perhaps against very hard initial odds), and see it as a good thing.
My intention here is not to point to the right solution (which I don't know), but to remark that piracy, for some a very big evil and for some others something akin to private copy, is here to stay and must be "workarounded", just in case it can't be reduced to black market levels and becomes widespread (I guess in such case it would be no longer piracy but something else).
And while the piracy aspect seems extraordinarily clear cut as illegal for some people, let me tell a sad history: the Spanish equivalent of the RIAA, a non-profit private institution, has managed to make into law a levy on blank media in order to compensate for the private copy right: every CD, DVD, mp3 player or capable phone, multimedia hard disk or disk not preinstalled with O.S. in a new computer, has a
portion [1] that goes to this private entity. There's no exception to this, there are simply no legal blank media without it nor ways to get an exemption (e.g. business that use these media for backup, or courts, that are mandated by law to record proceedings). Importing a single 50-stack DVD is cheaper
after shipping costs due to this. An equivalent institution, CEDRO, also gets money for the book publishing sector from printers and photocopiers.
With this climate, you can't wonder that most Spanish youth considers p2p as a perfectly fine way of obtaining music et al. They feel they're being charged in advance, with a preemptive piracy tax (which it is not!). You won't convince them that p2p downloading is illegal or immoral, the feel they're being milked in advance by the industry. This leads to wollff point that, for some people, "piracy" is just not wrong.
[1]
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_p....ADa_del_canon