[Rathji]

My opinion is that piracy is stealing and should be illegal and have a comparable, but smaller punishment to actually shoplifting the item in question.

That said, I think before this happens you need to change the laws to properly define piracy and have the proper technological developments to allow fair use, as outlined below.

1) If I buy a piece of media in ANY physical or digital format, I should be able to use that media in ANY format I would like, but I shouldn't be able to give it to my friends to use (or distribute through p2p).

2) If I am able to watch a show on TV because I have purchased the rights to that broadcast, I should be able to watch that content in multiple formats. This means that they should expand traditional TV services to include the ability to transmit to a portable device (It is possible that slingbox covers this already) and/or transcode into a portable format (for iPod, laptop, iPad etc). These transmissions or format shifted copies should include all the appropriate advertising because these people should be paid for their work. This might require an additional fee paid to cable companies to provide the equipment for these services.

The main barrier in these things is tech development to allow the format conversion or transmission to be done in a way to make sharing the content hard/impossible/prohibitive without infringing on these rights.