"[...] who says entertainment has to be free?" I would: just think about busking. You get the service first, and you leave a gratuity afterwards in an amount y

"[...] who says entertainment has to be free?" I would: just think about busking. You get the service first, and you leave a gratuity afterwards in an amount you believe is appropriate, but you decide if, and what, to pay. At a strip club you might pay a cover charge, and the dancer gratuities. The cover charge, in this case, is basically your own ISP and equipment costs, as well as any costs of physical media you are copying. If you copy and transmit bits based on that media, at your expense, to a friend, that friend is now in the position to give a gratuity that they weren't before. Copying isn't theft, it's the best advertisement possible: word-of-mouth. As much as we want to, we can't prevent side-viewing: listening to other people's TVs, seeing their lap-dances, or copies of DVDs that were on the Internet, etc, or saving anything on the Internet for later... (Trying costs rights.) The one-time fees (cover charges) have already been paid in all those cases (the opportunity for side-viewing wouldn't exist otherwise), and the ephemeral copies on the Internet are now strictly opportunities for gratuity income: 7 billion of them... Great! This is about more than entertainment. Copyright just keeps people's heads in the mud, in the same way patents are used as an excuse to withhold life-saving medicine, and worst of all: it keeps creator income at it's lowest possible level, albeit it's least risky... But a guaranteed $1/month is still worst than (7 billion * Probability of gratuity)/month. The moral arguments aside, IMHO, we are moving from a pay-first reality for intangibles to a gratuity reality. I don't think copyright is even needed for the latter, and I think it's a win, so IMHO, any moral arguments about getting entertainment for free are moot.