Filmmakers themselves talk about movies being culture as well as entertainment, and without piracy, being part of contemporary culture become (even more) a matter of your disposable income. So regardless if it is moral or not ( what is moral is not easily established in a global context ) we can ask if piracy does more good than bad for society ? Is there an even better alternative ?

In the end, copyright is based on laws created by governements as trade agreements, rarely involving the voting public when it's not a dictator or monarch making the rules. In effect copyright is a matter of law, not moral, and sometimed the law is not moral. In this case, I stay my judgement as it can only cloud the real issues.

Personally I think everybody who is not an adult, without a job or a home should by default be allowed free access to anything we call culture. Being part of society is - which everyone should be - is down to having a shared context. The so called entertainment is a major part of this, and without access to it you become an 'other', the outsider.

Moral or not.

I find it amusing that after all these decades people are still willing to have cultural artefacts being distributed at the whim of corporations rather than passionate archivists who actually care for the work.

So many movies are only available commercially in their objectively worst version (pan and scan, poor subtitles, no subtitles just dubbing, missing scenes, censored scenes, poor audio or poor picture), people who actually care for the film more than the copyright holders go out of their way to combine several awful versions into a version better than commercially available because they actually care about what they're distributing because it's for passion not profit..

I find it amusing that people in the US have been willing to extend copyright from the original 28 years to 100 years, and in most cases to give no moral rights to the artists involved in the creation of the work.

And this is the framework the US is pushing the rest of the world to adopt.

> If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

> That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

--Thomas Jefferson

After all these centuries, people are still willing to claim some sort of moral high ground in killing other people for their beliefs. And downloading a file is amusing?

Some people believe that copyright infringement is a morally acceptable response to copyright terms changing from limited to effectively infinite duration.