If laws are made via societal consent, sure, that's a fine assertion. However, laws like marijuana possession are not based on societal consent. In fact, there's this famous quote by Nixon's Chief of Staff who literally admits the drug laws were created for targeting groups, not because the drugs themselves are bad:
> You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the anti-war left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
So too with copyright laws written by corporations.
I know the quote. A lot of people voted for Nixon, and a lot of people agreed with him and his administration at the time. I don’t like it but that was the process, and we’ve spent a long time changing it, using the same process. For the most part that movement is working, and it’s working because the outcome of the process is respected. If you thumb your nose at the process when it doesn’t go your way, you can’t use it to get your way.
Corporations have a right to participate in the process just like you and I. Don’t like the outcome? Then do the hard work to change it.
Some people are more rules-oriented than others. It seems like you are, but many are also not. Think of people in the 90s saying "fuck the system," or hippies in the 60s, or civil rights leaders in the 20th century. It's not always the case that the system can reform itself. Sometimes explicitly disobeying the system is what leads to its change. I'm sure you can fill in the gaps with examples, of which many abound.
And sometimes disobeying the system delegitimizes the movement and prevents critical-mass political coalitions from forming, which in turn prevents change from happening. Likewise many examples abound, of which copyright reform is one.
From what I know about pirates (and I've been a part of many communities in which pirates engage, and am friends with many pirates), piracy is more about satisfying desires without paying money than it is a matter of principle about copyright reform. Lots of pirates spend seemingly infinite time cataloging, collecting, sorting, tagging, and distributing pirated media, not to mention figuring out how to get around DRM. But you won't find so many pirates expending the same energy to affect political change. To me, that's telling about their true motives.
Until pirates can convince people like me (supporters of copyright reform but not piracy), that their lawless behavior would end after successful political reform, a coalition to enact such reform will be impossible. Based on the comments in this thread, it seems like the main concern pirates have are getting what they want, how they want, when they want, without paying, regardless of anyone else's wishes.
Back in the day when the options were DVD or Cable, piracy had more legitimacy IMO. Pirates wanted better resolution, lower prices, to play media on their devices, to have on demand access. Today with the advent of ad-free, on-demand content at a low subscription price, continued piracy looks more like selfishness than activism or civil disobedience.
The resolution of media is far beyond what it was in the 00's, but still isn't good enough. The prices are much lower but now low enough. They can stream to any device they want but it's still not enough for pirates. The dream of the 00s pirates is alive in the 20s, but the 20s pirates still act like their piracy is a form of freedom fighting. It's not. Instead it lays bare the true intention the entire time was that pirates just wanted media but didn't want to pay for it.
> And sometimes disobeying the system delegitimizes the movement and prevents critical-mass political coalitions from forming, which in turn prevents change from happening
This is much rarer than its opposite, as I had mentioned. The number of revolutions that happened peacefully is much lower than those that happened violently, to give a political example.
> but still isn't good enough
It was good though, but now it's not anymore, that's the problem. There are two distinct groups of pirates that we should separate, because both are not the same and to discuss them as equal doesn't bring about the whole picture.
One, the serious pirates. These are the people you are talking about, who want higher quality and easy access. These are the people, like me, who download 4k rips to watch on their OLED TV and organize their Plex servers to auto-download new media that comes out. They may even have terabytes-large NAS. You will never get a cent out of these people, because, like you probably have experience with, they are not in the business of paying for media. Their act of piracy is itself what is satisfying. For example, I gain more enjoyment out of the fact that I can watch at higher qualities than paying customers can, than I do actually watching said media. I have not once in my life bought a movie or TV show (although I will go to a theater because that is an incomparable experience to watching on a TV; and I do buy software sometimes, especially if it's a creator I really like and wish to support). However, these types of pirates are extremely few compared to the second category:
Two, the casual pirates. Most pirates are not like me or others in this thread, they do not download 4k rips to watch on their OLED TV, they do not organize their Plex servers. The vast majority of pirates are those who search "{movie} watch online free" and click the first link. Their needs were well met when Netflix came onto the scene, where with one service at a low price, they could watch whatever they wanted. Same with Limewire being usurped by Spotify. Now with multiple streaming services, more people are searching "{movie} watch online free" because they don't want to sign up to yet another service. Piracy is a problem of convenience for most people.
Look at piracy statistics before Spotify and Steam, and look at them afterwards. Most casual pirates stopped pirating songs because they have an easy to use interface with 99.99% of all the songs they could want. Contrast that to Netflix 10 years ago versus today. The meme is real: https://i.redd.it/d3423w2g5ur21.jpg. With more fragmentation, don't wonder why piracy is coming back among group two.
Content creators cannot treat groups one and two as equal because one is rigid, they will never pay, so don't even try to convince them; but two is malleable, if your service is good enough, most of them will pay.
> You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the anti-war left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
So too with copyright laws written by corporations.