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Originally Posted by kennyc
It's clearly already happened and increasing. Just look at some of the comments in this thread or any of the "copying is not stealing" discussions. There is less and less sense of ethics and doing what is right and more and more a sense of entitlement and "it's legal if I don't get caught" attitude. A very sad commentary on society.
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Not to be rude (I mean that), but your moral absolutism is a bit narrow minded. Doing "what is right" is not an absolute. Stealing may be undesirable, but stealing to eat or to feed one's children is certainly certainly morally defensible. And copyright infringement is not stealing, but we don't need to go into that again.
In the face of gross injustice, people resist, either passively or actively. This is normal human behavior and quite healthy. The continued extensions of copyright are without question theft (not copyright infringement) from the public domain, stolen from all of humanity. This is certainly as great an injustice as making a copy of "Citizen Caine" without the permission of the copyright holder, which denies nothing but some money to the copyright holder. It doesn't even undo the injustice of having the intellectual property of the original material withheld from the public domain, where it would be if copyright extensions had not extended (I am not sure which extension would apply to this particular movie, released in 1941, but I hope you get my point), because the material cannot be legally used for derivative works, impoverishing our store of shared intellectual capital.
No offense!