I think the immaterial pirate issue is a fascinating topic! A living, thriving culture encourage sharing and copying. It's through copying we learn new stuff. Society should embrace copying. At the same time we should embrace the idea that sharing your resources enables other people to do good things. For example, if you enjoy some good entertainment - share your resources and (for example) /pay/ for the experience! Otherwise you might not get a new experience unless you make a movie yourself.
Of course it goes deeper than just entertainment. If you can't prevent people from having private conversations, how can you protect yourself against people copying your ideas and content? Forbidding /private/ file sharing, on the other hand, is ultimately a totalitarian idea.
Sharing computer code (as oppose to just sharing the data) has caused an explosion in out ability to automate workflows and produce new interesting content. For example, the Android OS is a Linux derivative which is all open source. Most of the algorithms controlling the Internet routers and protocols are open source. The potential in sharing ideas has been proven to be very, very powerful.
To get further in understanding the challenges (because the copyright- and patent wars are far from over) we need to introduce some nomenclature and differentiate between the (1) private spheres, which isn't regulated and where the strong rule, (2) the common market, which is where capital rule and economical transactions are heavily regulated and (3) the public space, which is work funded by the tax money and violence monopoly.
We can easily agree that on the /common market/, we should abide to a certain level of transparency and then of course, content control might even be important. It should apply to all transactions not only movies, but drugs, medical equipment, food we eat etc. (Enron, GMO, sex and guns). In the private sphere's we should only allow for the government to interfere if it can prevent violence or death.
"How should the artists get paid if we allow for private file sharing"? The answer is that enough people will pay for things they crave. There's a different side to this though just recently is starting to grow on us: "How is anyone getting paid in the near future when computers can do almost anything better than humans?" For sure, the question has been echoed every time we've seen technological change, but this time it isn't our muscles which are being replaced but our brains and this is different. So while some pirates might laugh at some content makers feeling ripped off, the real issue that working for money is going out of fashion. Real welfare and enablement comes from the access to cheap energy and the ability to process that energy into efficient automation by eliminating unnecessary work (which ultimately might be all work). What's left is to find a new system for distributing the wealth of the world. Understanding the nature of sharing what you care for to they people you care for might become really important then. In a sense, it has already begun, and when politicians are asked to "create jobs" this is what they attempt to do although they might be tricking themselves to believe otherwise.
Knowing what challenges the future hold and what will be required for building a better world is really hard. Copying and sharing really helps in finding the answers (even machinima ETC is making a better more communicative world, more true to itself, others and consequent in its intentions by sharing this show)
Copy and share.
