Sometimes I find myself in an outright contradictory situation when the attitude of copyright holders and the attitude of intellectual property pirates both really grind my gears at the same time.
Basically there are two absolute extremes, both of which are extremely common:
1) Some people think that it should be their constitutional and basic human right to freely copy and distribute intellectual property, including music, movies and computer software. Moreover, they think that music, movie and software companies should not have the legal right to demand money for their products and stop, using legal means, people from copying their products freely. In other words, that these companies have no right to demand money from their products.
That might sound like an exaggeration, but it isn't. That's the literal opinion and stance of many people, including some organizations and political parties, such as the infamous Pirate Party. The Pirate Party does not seek only to return copyright laws and the rights of copyright holders to reasonable levels. No, they want basically copyrights removed completely, all rights to be removed from their current owners, and all currently copyrighted material to become completely and legally free to be used and distributed by anybody, and they want to remove the right for the companies to demand money by legal means for the usage of their products. No, that's not an exaggeration. Those are the literal opinions of the Pirate Party, at least here.
One really irritating aspect of this is that these people are absolutely obnoxious about their acts of copyright infringement. They talk about how they copied such and such movie or such an such game, as if it was a completely normal thing to do. Some even boast how they got to see a leaked movie or leaked piece of software in advance, like if it was some kind of cool achievement. Their regard to other people's property and rights is completely nil. They couldn't care less.
And of course they always use all the old tired excuses why they don't care and why they copy anything they want without any regard. None of them considers it in any way a criminal act (as if legality was defined by them rather than their government) or as anything wrong (by using all the tired old excuses).
2) On the other extreme we have companies, especially (and almost exclusively) music companies, who think that copyright infringment is more serious of a crime than eg. mass murder or gang rape. Especially in the USA this has gone to atrocious extremes, where eg. a woman was fined 2 million dollars because of illegally downloading 24 songs.
I don't think that even a gang rape usually results in a fine of 2 million dollars. It seems that 24 songs are more valuable than the physical and mental health of a person, according to the RIAA and the United States judiciary system.
And that's only the tip of the iceberg. The music companies seem to have the attitude that music is so extremely important that they should have the same rights as police officials. They harass people, they harass institutions (such as universities) into revealing private confidential information about their members, they extort money from people by using threats, and they constantly fire up frivolous lawsuits for such petty crimes as copying a couple of songs, and demand exorbitant amounts of money. They also seem to think that they have all the rights in the world to invade the privacy of their customer's computers by installing rootkits and whatnot, regardless of what the actual laws of the customers' countries might say (as if the music companies considered themselves to be above the law).
As said, sometimes it feels rather contradictory to find both extremes really irritating and obnoxious, like being pulled to two directions at once. That in itself is irritating.
Why are there only extremes in this world?