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I'd like to step back a moment and look at copyright today from three aspects - moral, legal, and practical,
1. Practical - The cost of copying a file is approaching zero. The time it takes is usually less that 5 minutes per Gigabyte of file. Two clicks and a wiggle of a mouse is the labor involved. Everybody with a computer can do it. Before computers, this could not be done. Furthermore, it can be done tracelessly, although most popular methods leave an audit trail.
These are facts, just like air and rock and water. There is no magic wand to make it go away. To change it would require one the the following - 1. scrapping all the computers, 2. Moral persuasion to keep people from doing it. or 3. Unlimited search and seizure - any place, any time.
2. Moral - If you convince people though education (or some would call it propaganda) not to make unauthoized copies, you will limit the problem. Not eliminate it, as there are always criminals for every law. But you can't convince people without holding to the same moral code yourself, even when it hurts. The concept of "Do what I say, not what I do" is a morally bankrupt as "Might makes right" or "The check is in the mail". No one will believe you, they'll just figure you're being self-serving (and rightly so).
Today, the organized copyright holders are displaying the worldview as follows - We are going to keep all copyright material forever in contravention of US constitution. We are going to sue anybody we can spare the resources to sue in order to enforce the doctrine. You have no rights to what we sell you. You are just buying tickets, so to speak. We will provide only the level of quality we choose to provide. We'll get you to buy over and over again by providing incrementally better quality. If you don't like this, we'll attack you legally. And, oh by the way, copying our files is immoral. You're a bad person for doing it. Letting things lapse into the public domain, as according to the constitution?...Oh, you're so cute. We going to keep it forever. Know your place...
This is not the stuff moral persuasion is made of.
3. - Legal - All copyright is a relative modern concept. It has no equivalent in "natural law". You won't find it in the major religious books. It was legislated for the express purpose of encouraging new works, balanced with the utility for the entire human race of having the results of creativity freely available. Unfortunately, certain big corporations have determines that they can make money of a small percentage of their old copyright material. Being a corporation, they never expect to die. So they expect the Life + x really means the corporation's Life + x, or forever. This is a complete usurption of the reason for the laws, and voids any moral respect for said law. So what do you do about an immoral law? Change the law? Can you outbid Hollywood for Congressmen? I can't. Civil disobedience? Especially when it's so very easy to do? (That's not Civil Disobedience, that's just stealing!) (And stretching copyright lengths isn't stealing from the public, that granted copyright in the first place?) (Two wrongs don't make a right!) (So we try to get rid of one wrong and leave the other unmolested?)...
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