"The online theft of American intellectual property is no different than the theft of products from a store. It is illegal and the law should be enforced both in the store and online."
How to show you understand not a single thing about the issue.
I try hard to stretch my imagination and see things from other's viewpoints. To me it seems the majority of people view piracy about "someone obtained something that wasn't theirs." We tend to look at it as "I still have what is mine."
I guess if we look a bit deeper you could stretch the issue to one's worldview. Are you more concerned with your belongings or what others posses. Is there a larger inclination to worry about another's success over your own? Seemingly they're threatened by individuals possessing their products. I'd like to believe their fight is against commercial pirates but they've shown too many times that they see individual "pirates" as a threat to their industry. Public support might weigh in on their side if they weren't so eager to make average joe a poster boy for their legal matters.
> How to show you understand not a single thing about the issue.
Ironically, I think your criticism here does the same.
At the end of the day the question really is: "Is someone able to earn money from labor X?" If the answer here is "yes" then they'll keep doing it. If the answer here is "no", they'll do something else. Can we at least agree that it would be a good thing to have music/movies/software/"creative works" available in some form?
The ability to freely duplicate and share creative works make it difficult to produce a "yes" answer to that question. How we as a society currently produce and distribute creative works make a "yes" answer even more difficult than it otherwise might be.
How to show you understand not a single thing about the issue.