Either pay the price asked because you want that game or movie so bad, or say the cost is too high and walk away entirely.

I don’t entirely disagree with this regarding newer content, and I personally don’t pirate that… but I will happily subvert a system of near perma-copyright that was never meant to exist, goes entirely against key concepts around copyright when it was first conceived, and only exists due to extreme regulatory capture. It has been perverted far beyond its intent.

7 years. Copyright was meant to last about 7 years. There was, at that time, an acknowledgment that culture belongs to society as a whole and shouldn’t be monopolized by one person, stifling innovation (I mean, Disney is basically founded on reworking others’ stories; would they ever have hit it big if they couldn’t have done that? Hard to say…)… copyright was seen as a sort of necessary evil to give an artist a few years of a legal monopoly to incentivize art creation.

That’s about the cutoff I use. If it’s older than 7 years, you’ve had your chance to make a buck. Even moreso today… 7 years is far more time today to actually exploit your monopoly, information is just so quickly disseminated. I tried to show my kid Charlie Brown Christmas this last holiday season… absolutely criminal that people can still gatekeep that for money, that kind of thing should belong to society as a whole. Zero qualms about going to the high seas for that kind of thing.

tl;dr I think the ethics of piracy are nuanced, but I absolutely do not buy the argument that the current law around copyright is ethical as it stands and as an unethical law, it should be subverted.