“…I would be for copyright if it lasted a reasonable amount of time but it doesn’t.”

I disagree with this, there is no “reasonable” amount of time for copyright. Nobody needs copyright, it just makes one particular business model feasible, the read-only model. However, it’s not the only model and the unlimited propagation of content is much more beneficial to promoting the progress than it is to give artists property-like control over the cultural resources that are naturally the common heritage of humanity.

To put it in an analogy, copyright is like giving someone permission to use our highways for their business and, by using them, become the owners of those highways. The same thing happens in copyright. Public resources are utilized (our common culture) to create something that becomes, in effect, property of the artist. Then, those resources are held in exclusive possession, barring people from making further use of that modified cultural context to promote more modification.

The entire mechanism of the progress of art and knowledge is the continual adaptation and modification of prior works, but we can’t continue that mechanism if they are held back by pseudo-property rights over content. The well is going to dry up eventually when all ideas are “owned”.

The thing the copyright industry glosses over day-in and day-out is that the real value in content is the ability of artists to make it. The action of creation is the valuable thing. That’s what we should be investing in, not this silly marketing of imaginary property. Creativity is a process of exploring possibilities, selecting the best one, and executing/expressing the raw idea in a refined and polished form. We should be investing in that action rather than buying a “product” that doesn’t actually exist.

The publishers love the system they persist in because they get to pay a fixed amount on production/marketing and then have a potentially infinite supply of “product” that they can sell as if it was scarce. That kind of power, that level of control, is addictive. It’s like a drug to them and they don’t want to give up their favorite drug. They will do anything it takes to hold on to that drug, or even to get more of it. The “pirates” are viewed in the sense that they are holding out on more of the drug they crave so badly, something they feel entitled to. So, they see it as a threat to their continued feeding of their addiction and a violation of their “property”.