Ha, well Kant's universal moral law is really what I'm getting at here. It transcends the current, highly immoral, Western legal system which is often confused with universal law.
Yeah, Kant wasn't a fan of 'law' in the legal sense, but natural and moral law does respect property rights. I'm not really aware of a deontological argument against IP.
I don't think philosophy has caught up with the dizzing media landscape we exit in today. It's such a multifaceted problem.
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.
Well, philosophy is one of those disciplines in which work is always being done, but it's takes time for any work to become well recognized. Some day, some ethics ideas written by someone living right now will be something everyone reads about in philosophy 101. But we can still apply many of the frameworks from hundreds of years ago to current ethics problems. There are no completely new moral ideas, everything is similar, influenced by, or related to ideas that others have come up with.
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.
A pragmatist might say, "Piracy can only be contextualized and not objectively analyzed".
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.
