Dare has a great rant on copyright.

A key purpose of giving authors and other content creators exclusive rights to their intellectual property is to enable them to be rewarded financially from their works for some time before allowing these creations to become "owned" by society. This is supposed to be an incentive that enables the creation of a professional class of content creators and thus benefits society by increasing the number and quality of copyrighted works as well as creating a market/economy around copyrighted works.

Most arguments against copyright laws are directly or indirectly an attempt to challenge the existence or benefits afforded the professional class of content creators. It should be noted that professionals dominate practically all areas of content creation (i.e. professionally created content is most popular or most valuable) even when you consider newer areas of content creation that have shown up in the past decade or so.

It's because of posts like this that I've always been a fan of Dare - he engages issues intelligently and objectively. And his understanding of the subtleties of copyright is particularly impressive considering he's not a lawyer. 

As I've discussed before, copyright is a limited monopoly and the key is balancing the "incentive to create" with the interests of the public. This requires constant work to keep both sides in check. (Personally, I believe the shift to digital formats tilts the scales too much in favor of the creator, but hopefully this will be addressed at some point.)

In all of these discussion - whether downloading music or syndication - we must remember that, fair use and other exceptions aside, the power to choose sits with the creator. Though fair use may sometimes enable it, the goal is not economic efficiency. The law does not entitle the public to ignore copyright if they don't like how the owner is using them. That is, we cannot decide that "they would be better off with free advertising", or that we deserve free music because "they're too rich".

That said, there is a distinction between copyright infringement and stealing. (Again, this doesn't mean it's right, but it's worth understanding the differences).