I Pirate Music

I do.  I have pirated thousands of songs.  I do have a rationale for this, but it's not the point of this post.  My reason for stating my piracy here is the insane fact that I could be charged a great deal of money, and possible jail time, for it.  Lawrence Lessig describes one case where a woman uploaded a video of her eighteen month old dancing to a Prince song, which was taken down for copyright violation.  The question implied is whether or not this amateur video constitutes a new work of art separate from the original song, but I'd like to ask a different one: is our relationship to copyright, and specifically the protection of artists, in the U.S. fundamentally flawed?  Obviously, I think so.  Two examples: In 2009, Boston University student Joel Tenenbaum was fined 675,000 dollars for illegally downloading 30 songs.  In the same year, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a single mother of four from Brainerd, Minn., was found liable for violating the copyrights of major labels including Sony BMG, and Universal by downloading 24 songs from Kazaa.  She was fined 1.92 million dollars.  Is this not insanity?  This has happened about 30 times in the past few years: record agencies, and usually the RIAA, picking on individuals that can't fight back and who have to settle out of court, all so that they can prove that piracy is stealing, and should be legally dealt with as such.  But consider what stealing is.  I'm a vendor, let's say, and I have a shirt in my store.  If you take that shirt, then it is gone, and I am out the money.  But if it is a digital picture of a shirt, or perhaps a song about a shirt, and I pirate it, all I do is make a copy.  The original remains.  For this reason alone piracy is not theft.  The record agency is out the money, yes, but most musicians (you know, the ones actually producing the material) are relatively unaffected, as they acquire the majority of their income from touring and merchandise sales (the sales of shirts for example, the theft of which would actually be a crime worth significant interest by law enforcement).  I'm not exactly sure where I'm going with this, except to say that before we can get to a national dialog on the morality of recycling artwork, we must first deal with our corporations' obsession with copyright.