> MPAA/RIAA aren't hated for abusing terminology.

Perhaps they aren't hated for it, but they sure are ridiculed for it. "You wouldn't steal a car"->"You wouldn't download a car" anyone?

That's not a terminology abuse, that's a hilarious misunderstanding of social norms.

Eh, I don't know. Is it really a misunderstanding if it is intentional?

Yeah right. They're hated because they look at the people ripping off their stuff and sites like ThePirateBay profiteering on their content and try to stomp on that sandcastle.

No, they are hated for doing the legal/moral equivalent of beating a child bloody for shoplifting a snickers bar. (And added to that, not taking especially good care that the child they happen to be punching is the one that actually took it).

Its not that they react to being ripped off, its that they react more like Los Zetas than law abiding shop-keepers when they do.

And also subverting the public domain (the Disney extensions) and trying to force everyone on the internet to do policing for them (SOPA). And pushing for much harsher IP laws both in scope and penalties.

The Disney thing is largely unrelated, the amount of content even a decade old being pirated is negligible compared to the latest whatever.

Actually it is related - they want to stop the creativity of the others.

RIAA/MPAA mission is simple:

They want to own all of the content, control the ways to distribute that content, that content to be used only as they say, forever.

Are we discussing why they are hated, or why people use sites like The Pirate Bay?

Because Disney is sure as shit related to the first.

I'm talking about the Copyright Extension Act in 1995, largely attributed to Disney, that makes really old stuff almost nobody is pirating remain copyright and out of the public domain?

The reasons they may be hated for that don't bear much relationship with copyright infringement which focuses almost exclusively on newly released things that would be copyright regardless of Disney's lobbying.

The Copyright Extension Act in 1995 is a significant part of why they are hated. It is anything but irrelevant or unrelated.

You are the one attempting to insinuate that only people who use The Pirate Bay object to their perversion of copyright laws and discussion. Multiple alternative reasons to be angry with them have now been presented to you, but you just claim they are unrelated because you assert that the real reason is that they are just interested in pirating recent things. In discarding these alternative reasons because they they don't mesh with your already unsupported assertion, you are begging the question.

People are in fact upset with the MPAA/RIAA for their abuse of terminology and all that it facilitates: the corruption of copyright laws, weaponized lawsuits, and the shackling of (frankly ancient) culture.

Pretend that people are only upset with their abuse of terminology because they want to pirate things all you want, but you are dead wrong.

If that were really true, then there should be markedly less piracy of content from publishers not affiliated with the MPAA or RIAA, but that doesn't seem to actually be the case.

How do you think that follows? I am not asserting that people pirate MPAA/RIAA content because they hate those organizations, nor do I think that is the case. That would be a foolish thing to assert.

I think that people pirate primarily opportunistically. Some of these people try to justify their piracy by saying they hate the MPAA/RIAA and pirate for ideological reasons, other pirates do not.

People, sometimes people who pirate, sometimes not, hate the MPAA/RIAA for a wide variety of reasons that have been beaten to death in this thread.

TPB are paramount in any accurate representation of copyright infringement as it exists today.

I don't dispute people are upset with the MPAA/RIAA, just that it has very little to do with Disney or material that shoulda/coulda/woulda been public domain at various times in the last century.

Centuries before Disney was created the copyright length was still decades longer than the age of material people primarily pirate.

You are completely ignoring the possibility that there exist people who hate the MPAA/RIAA despite not pirating. Furthermore you are completely ignoring the possibility that some people pirate opportunistically, and hate the MPAA/RIAA for reasons unrelated to their pirating habit.

You cannot strike out the possibility of non-pirating critics with evidence of what pirates prefer to pirate, since all critics just being pirates is your unsupported assertion.

  1. Critics are pirates.

  2. Pirates pirate new material.  Pirates are not concerned
     with old material.

  3. Critics are not concerned with old material.

2 is almost certainly true; I certainly do not deny it. 1 is your unsupported assertation. 3 cannot logically follow from 1 and 2 so long as 1 is unsupported. 3 cannot be cited as support of 1, that is circular reasoning.

TPB wouldn't have taken off on such a rapid trajectory if the MPAA and RIAA hadn't been so content to gouge the public in decades past.

Rabid public adoption of music and video piracy is most certainly a function of the public's perceptions re: price/value and anger at blatant collusion on the part of record labels to inflate prices.

Oh bullshit, most people couldn't give a flying fuck about that or they'd have boycotted the products before the internet came along. People like free stuff; it's not like they've been sending 1/10th of the money they saved on stuff they downloaded to the artists' fan clubs.