Theft?

Copyright law must be very complex. Intellectual property is pretty hard to protect and there are probably more pirated versions of music and movies than there are bone fide kosher versions.
The internet has enabled people to copy and share more or less any sort of file these days and those trying to enforce the law must feel that they are spitting into the wind. There cannot be many people out there who do not have any pirated stuff in their collections, and the thing is, it doesn't feel as if you are doing anything wrong.
Piracy of music really took off with the invention of the cassette recorder. Suddenly it became easy to record the latest album and give copies to all of your mates. Thus at a stroke the number of LP sales should have been vastly reduced. It didn't really happen did it? There must have been millions of illegal copies of all of the Beatles albums made, and yet i am not aware of any claims from them that they were impoverished by the process.
I remember Napster. The website that enabled and encouraged the sharing of music files. It was a wonderful way to meet people and to share ideas as well as files, and I believe that the "illegal" sharing exposed many people to music that they would jot of heard of before, thus encouraging them to go out and buy stuff. Napster was taken to court and closed down by the band Metallica, who didn't like the idea of not being paid for something. Ironically their drummer was recently reported as illegally downloading a copy of their own album. Now there is a thorny legal issue.
I know people who download whole movies to their PC. The copies are usually poor in quality and personally I can't see the point. Renting DVDs is quite cheap and even buying them from Amazon or Play.com makes them quite affordable. I guess that there is a genetic predisposition within the human genome that urges us to try to get something for nothing. Fundamentally we all have the potential to become thieves and only very few of us manage to keep that tendency in check.