[jammies]

Long-term, this will cultivate disrespect for the law, much like Prohibition permanently affected the culture of the USA. Other than that, it will have little effect other than to ruin a few lives and waste law enforcement resources.

Of course downloading paid content for free is wrong, but it's perceived on the same level as jaywalking or speeding. And, I think, rightly so - content providers spent decades repackaging and reselling the same content on different media, using the argument that you didn't have rights to the content, but just paid for the specific piece of media on which it was duplicated. Now that consumers don't need to buy media, that argument is turned back on its head to say that if all you were buying was the media, and you don't need that, you shouldn't be paying anything at all.