As someone who sees pirating as civil disobedience, I would like to respectfully disagree.

Disney (and friends) spend the GDP of a small country to ensure that my entire life is surrounded by their products and enshrined themselves in international treaties to ensure that it will remain so. I could stop consuming their media, which would require me to withdraw from 90% of all movies and music that my friends and family want to watch, which whether I like it or not is what I would call "my culture".

I don't think this is fair, specially considering that I had no say in this state of things and that changing it would require me to essentially mobilize my entire nation against the foreign interests of the USA.

I don't expect everyone to agree with this point of view, but to call it "intellectually dishonest" feels to me like an unnecessary agression. If anything, I would counterargue: expecting people to either pay a toll to access their culture or to to become "cultural monks" is what's truly wrong, especially when there's an alternative that literally favors the interests of people over corporations.

I am re-listening to Lessig's "Free Culture" this week while driving. My oh my how the younger generation has been conditioned to have no rights as consumers. Just pay perpetually and hope permission is granted, the licensing doesn't require yet another subscription and hope the servers don't go down b/c they're no longer profitable. When driving in silence it sounds just like my Yahoo Music library sounds these days.

this civil disobedience, is it just evening the score between you and Disney? Because that I would understand. What I'm criticising is the claim of piracy as some sort of moral fight of the oppressed. The noble filesharer uploading this year's Transformers instalment for the greater good. That's just giving it way more credit than it deserves.

This is true AFAIK. Growing up in a lower economic class, I'd engage in piracy simply because modern computers make it trivial. At first it was for entertainment, but over time it exposed me to programming. Piracy ended up being a gateway to building my career, so I'm thankful for that much. Even if it's kind of ironic.

I have and will gladly pay money for authors/developers that really get me excited, though consuming so much interesting content for free can make me pretty jaded. To a pirate, paying for certain software might as well be giving a donation.

I personally find more intellectually dishonest to compare piracy to theft.