And I'm having a hard time seeing 15 dollar books and movies and 99 cent songs as "taxing through the nose".
These days it is clear that copyright should only be granted by society in exchange to obligations to make the work available to the society at reasonable terms; as time passes the terms should be more and more permissive.
The copyright owners should not dictate their will to the society which empowered them in the first place when it's clearly hurts the society.
Or else old people would tend to become unavailable at all because you can't locate original authors. And music becoming available is very bad. Much worse than "scary criminal pirate" bad.
However, we all know that that vast, vast majority of piracy is of newer works and isn't at all related to the fact that copyright lasts too long.
For example, tomorrow I'm going to pirate Game Of Thrones S02E01 because there is no way to obtain it where I live: legally, in English, with subtitles, tomorrow. Mind you, many people would still pirate it anyway, but I'm ready to pay, let's say, 5$ if it was possible. And I might even reconsider my position on piracy. It's not so I'm going to pirate it and I feel no guilt because they've violated the contract: they provide content, I pay money.
The only way to fix the situation is legally force them to deliver. This way they lose some short term money, but they gain loyalty, crush piracy and win in the long term.
Same with music. Streaming services already eat at piracy; but not every musician is available on those. Same with books.
