I don't think you can claim a coherent moral philosophy when the morality of an action depends on the legal jurisdiction you happen to be standing in.
I think every citizen has the responsibility to choose to not follow unjust laws.
Conversely, not all immoral acts are illegal, e.g. cheating on a spouse.
At any rate, "the law" is a body of rules so large and complex that likely almost no one actually manages to get through a month without breaking it a couple times.
I completely disagree. To think otherwise is to be entirely passive and compliant in a world that quite possibly could be (edit: is) corrupt on many levels.
And it is sort of similar in the sense that, copyright law is over aggressive, honestly, many speed limits are set too low, violation is pretty wide-spread, and within reason it seems basically fine.
It breaks down a bit at the edges though, because extreme violations of speed limits can result in harm and death, while copyright is just lost profits.
But the "magnitude" is so low, I can't imagine caring when other people do it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg%27s_stages_o...
There's a litany of incidents where the FBI has raided homes just to snag one pirater.
With how politically weaponized the FBI has become in recent years, I personally would want to do everything I could to avoid attracting any attention from them.
Not worth it to watch some shitty trash TV or movie, personally.
It’s not remotely the same amount of harm, but mass violations of copyright seem to be able to end series and potentially production companies. Netflix and Hulu appear to be making go/no-go decisions about a series after the first few days/weeks of viewership data.
Lysander Spooner goes on to expand this theme greatly.
Foundational essay, well worth a read: https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/spooner-no-treason-no-vi-t...
Now that we can agree that law can not be followed 100% of time let's kill the comparison with genocide.
Like others have mentioned, media is heavily shaping culture today, and is responsible for a large amount of cultural dissemination and public discourse. And today, to be a patron of the arts, you are looking at an increasingly large library of works which you need affordable access to. Knowledge shouldn't be pay-to-play.
With companies like Disney eating the lion's share, we should worry about what kind of legal landscape a continued, coordinated lobbying effort could lead to. Remember the shock around the DMCA? We still have massive and systematic abuse issues because of it. A chilling effect is well-established.
With the way Microsoft, Apple and other vendors are moving, locked down computing platforms are becoming a silent reality. Thanks to corporate astroturfing efforts, cloud fingerprinting is being normalized as the moral choice. What's next, screen fingerprinting to ensure our greedy, multi-headed subscription serpent overlord always gets its piece of the pie?
Eventually, unchecked corporate lobbying in areas like IP will lead to an inscrutable system of governance hiding behind the opt-in curtain, which completely sidesteps the ever-evolving system of rights envisioned by our past democratic visionaries.
As you point out, there are plenty of utilitarian and/or consequentialist arguments for piracy. From an academically philosophical perspective, these aren't "right" or "wrong" arguments, they're just from a different school of philosophical thought than some other arguments which may dismiss concerns of utility or consequence.
a consequentialist might say: "Piracy is fine because the DMCA causes chilling effects which are bad, regardless of the wishes of the author."
a utilitarian might say: "Knowledge is good for society so piracy provides greater utility for mankind, more than it harms a few authors."
but a deontologist might say: "we have to respect the rights given to someone to reproduce their work, regardless of bad consequences"
All of these are academically valid arguments, regardless of which one any of us subscribe to.
It's a completely different set of arguments from someone like us who can object on aesthetic and philosophical grounds, vs. a poor kid from Brazil who just wants some cultural exposure.