The Globe and Mail

"There's no chance of you getting caught, and it doesn't hurt anyone directly,” says the guy who acquired much of his sizable music collection from a dubious site in Russia. “And it's something you do in the privacy of your own home.”

Oh, callow youth, loitering around the side entrances of schools with their iPods full of ill-gotten songs and their mouths full of self-serving rationalizations.

Except that particular statement didn't come from a callow youth. It came from a Crown prosecutor (who requested anonymity for reasons you might deduce).

It's 2009, and whether we like it or not, piracy isn't just tolerated: It's almost de rigueur. Doctors share files. Professors share files. Lawyers stock their shelves with Chinese knock-off DVDs. Reputable young business owners buy cavernous servers and stock them with every piece of pilfered media they can get their hands on. And those are just my friends.

When news broke last month that the founders of the Pirate Bay, one of the most notorious file-sharing websites, had been sentenced to a year in prison and ordered to pay millions to major media companies, industry leaders hoped that the verdict might send a clear moral message: Piracy is wrong.

But that idea hasn't clicked with the youth of today. It didn't click when Napster was shut down in 2001. It didn't click when the Recording Industry Association of America went off like Yosemite Sam, suing file swappers until eventually a single mother was fined $222,000 (a retrial was later ordered).

Will it ever click? With a much-hailed new edition of Amazon's popular Kindle e-reader threatening to breach a final bastion of analogue culture and drag books into the download age, copyright holders are beginning to wonder.

In the hothouse of the Internet, this love of untrammelled intellectual exchange quickly mutated into a Cult of Free that cheers blatant piracy. The hard-core part of online culture came to cherish the free flow of information above almost all else.

Copyright has always been a study in contradictions. Western culture has long been at odds as to whether works of art belong solely to their creators or also to a nation or to humanity. When copyright laws clamped down on the trade of illegally printed books in the 19th century, they ran counter to the citizenry's sense that they had a right to the knowledge in those volumes.

Plus ça change. When it comes to culture, says Myra Tawfik, a law professor at the University of Windsor, “we expect it to be accessible to us in the most convenient and easy way possible.” And if that access proves to be too expensive or onerous, consumers have demonstrated few misgivings about grabbing culture wherever they can.

That desire has dovetailed with the “free culture” movement, whose advocates are leery of the intellectual-property regime that has been evolving in the past half-century, placing more and more power in the hands of copyright owners (most of them corporations) as opposed to the public domain. Spearheaded by thinkers such as Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig, the founder of the Creative Commons movement, they argue that restricting the way people can appropriate and recontextualize media deprives citizens of the ability to interact with their own culture.

Writers such as Cory Doctorow have gained followings by championing free culture and lambasting the excesses of copyright owners, such as the record labels' quixotic, abortive quest to sue file-sharers into submission. It's an appealing and progressive idea, and its enthusiasts have tended to lionize all things free – open-source software; share-alike copyright agreements; music built on samples of other music; and all kinds of collaged cultural “mashups.”