But those activities are protected and legal under first-use laws, because I bought the CD or DVD originally or my friend did.
Here's some food for thought on the concept of 'theft.'
Over the years - at least twice now in my lifetime - hollywood lobbyists have convinced the US congress to retroactively extend the term of copyright. In other words, works of art that were created and published under very explicit terms regarding the point in time which the works would become public domain were 'stolen' from the public. If those creators or copyright owners didn't want their work to become public domain, they should not have agreed to the terms of the copyright social contract by publishing in the first place.
In essence, those retroactive copyright extensions have stolen millions of works of art from each and every citizen of the USA. Including you.
Sony, like just about all major publishers in the USA, is therefore a thief on a scale that dwarfs anything internet piracy could ever amount to - even if every single person in the country were to pirate every single movie they watch and song they listen to, it still wouldn't come close.
Therefore, except in the rare cases of a handful of indie publishers, there is no moral high-ground with respect to piracy, terms like 'theft' and even 'piracy' itself are loaded words that people frequently use to claim that non-existent high-ground.
As someone who has earned every cent since college by selling my creative output in one form or another - but never relying on copyright to do so - I think the internet and piracy highlight just how broken the idea of copyright is.
Business models need to change - capitalism is fundamentally about managing scarce resources, but the internet makes copies of creative works infinitely plentiful. Copyright has become an attempt to create artificial scarcity so that the tenets of capitalism can still be applied. But copyright is merely a law of man and, unlike the inherent scarcity of labor and physical items, is easily ignored by other men. I would even go so far as to say copyright is inherently in contradiction with basic human nature. You don't like the term 'file sharing' but sharing of information is what has elevated modern society from the hunter-gatherer level. Unlike real crimes like theft and murder, just about everybody likes to share cool stuff and laws that oppose basic human nature have uniformly been expensive failures (prohibition, illegal immigration, the war on some drugs, prostitution, miscegenation, etc).
Production of creative works needs to move to a business model that sells naturally scarce resources like labor and physical products. One example is the 'ransom model' (google it) in recent months there have been some pretty amazing successes with the ransom model in the video game world. But there are plenty of other options - like the subscription model (which is practically the same as current cabletv/magazine/netflix business models). Or the donation model (which I am not a big fan of because it goes against human nature of being selfish) which seems to have worked well in a few big-name cases like radiohead and nine-inch-nails and looks to be doing OK for the producer of the movie "Sita Sings the Blues"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1172203/ who is combining it with a merchandising business model.
PS - I know Dekom well, he's one of the few members of the hollywood 'old-guard' who understands in both his gut as well as his brain that the world has changed and that the business needs to change with it or die. It's unfortunate that he wasn't successful with his own start-up attempting to have a go at bringing those changes about.
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