There are people who want things for free. However before the internet those were the people trading bootlegs, buying $2 CDs from sketchy catalogs, borrowing c

There are people who want things for free. However before the internet those were the people trading bootlegs, buying $2 CDs from sketchy catalogs, borrowing cds from the library or friend, watching MTV, listening to the radio or simply not listening to music. I would argue that they are no more supportive of piracy than any other form of free entertainment. Additionally, I don't believe most of them support piracy because they want free stuff (there are some horders out there, but that's an actual mental illness/tv show). Most of the people who "like free stuff" support piracy because they value the entertainment they get. By far the biggest group here are teenagers, and it appears that the more music teenagers without money download the more music they will buy legally later in life. Right now teenage unemployment was 25% last summer and that's just among teenagers who wanted to work. Unpaid internships seem to have become the norm. If we don't give teenagers a way to get the medium of exchange we shouldn't be surprised that they develop parallel economies. That said, if they weren't going to buy music anyway or, as most studies find, people buy more music in the presence of file sharing, it doesn't imply that there is any theft going on or that creators are damaged in any way by more value being derived from the work they already did. I think record companies see their control over the airwaves and their kingmaker roll slipping away. Like publishers, they are progressively less relevant and the services they do provide aren't worth nearly the percentage of profits they charge their artists. They don't need to believe it is theft for them to cynically exploit the argument in order to remain relevant.