> he made content available when the producers wouldn't

Yeah, that's called theft. The "producers" are the guys (or organizations) that paid their money to have these TV shows shot, you know. If they wanted to, they could sell only one copy of their shows at all, like Wu Tang. Or just show us the trailers, make everyone want them, and never release them, just for the laughs.

No it isn't. It's called copyright infringement.

> Yeah, that's called theft.

Only by loose metaphor; its actually properly called "copyright infringement", which is more analogous to trespass to chattels than to theft, or even conversion (though it obviously differs from either in that copyrights are intangible personal property, and the others deal with tangible personal property.)

That's certainly the legal doctrine. Personally, I don't happen to agree with it.

How? I honestly don't understand how a person in the same ethical framework could disagree with this, if he fully understands the situation.

Here's one way: once you release something publicly enough it becomes part of our culture. You don't own our culture, any part of it, even if you created some of the art in it. Your work lives in a context surrounded by other works you did not create, and could only have been created as a response to them. That's how art works. So while you have some rights to it, you don't have absolute and complete rights to determine what happens to it after release; it belongs primarily to society now, with a respectful nod towards you. People are free to talk about it, watch it, look at it, listen to it, learn from it in ways you never imagined. And you won't get paid for all of them. Welcome to creating art.

Ethic and morality judgement is very subjective endeavour with inconsistent results across the population. In other words, most people do not exist in "the same ethical framework". The justice framework used by judges is perhaps more consistent, but not necessarily better than other competitive view for any case in hand. Sometimes the very laws are very immoral.

Do you want to know how long you should have to wait to get US TV shows in the EU? AS LONG AS THE COPYRIGHT OWNER THINKS YOU SHOULD WAIT. This sort of entitled "I want any content that interests me and I want it for free" attitude is exactly what plays into the hands of those who want to limit copyright reform.

The whole point of copyright is to make the works available. It is explicitly the reason why the creator is given a time limited monopoly.

From Wikipedia:

"... the Statute of Anne is formally titled "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of Copies, during the Times therein mentioned".[45] The preamble for the Statute indicates the purpose of the legislation - to bring order to the book trade - saying:

    ..., and for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books; May it please Your Majesty, that it may be Enacted... "

And people like you have some entitled thinking that you have the right to deny people like me (I am from a third world country that is mostly ignored by copyright owners) the right for culture and education.

I pirated thousands of stuff, and I am proud to say it, because pirating thousands of stuff is how I educated myself, and how I got cultured in things that don't exist in my country, and now allow me to do the amazing stuff that I do (including participate in the international economy, that has more money available than local economy, and earn enough money to sometimes be able to legally buy something, instead of pirating it).

Your situation highlights my philosophical disagreement with Intellectual Property.

I think, when you really analyze the basic motivations behind IP, they come down to 'It's the law of the jungle.' aka "Fuck you, pay me".

There are lots of humane laws that take the exigencies of life into account, but there are also laws that the powerful have created to exploit the less powerful. A legal framework that excludes the poor from sharing the ideas of the powerful or wealthy is not an 'enlightened' law, and therefore I believe anything that can be done to fight it or weaken it's enforcement mechanisms is a mitzvah.

> AS LONG AS THE COPYRIGHT OWNER THINKS YOU SHOULD WAIT

The point of copyright was to ensure that people who made creative works could get paid and earn a living. Not to tie their cultural works up for the rest of their lives, everyone else be damned.

Given that the idea of a "tragedy" has been around for a few thousand years now (the greeks wrote about it a long time ago) how is any creative work created completely in a vacuum? I believe that the answer is that it is not. Many stories have different details but there are probably only a few dozen archetypical stories.

We have the idea of compulsory licensing for a bunch of different things. Why shouldn't movies and TV shows and such also be licensed that way?

What a perverse view of the world our twisted regulations have created. Patents and copyrights were created explicitly to encourage distribution by providing limited financial incentives (monopoly), not prevent it.