The New York Times published an article by Cary Sherman entitled "What Wikipedia Won't tell you" that puts another spin on the issue:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/08/opinion/what-wikipedia-wont-tell-you.html

The article itself has lots of great points (to my surprise) but the user comments are excellent and give you an idea of how complex the problem really is. Neil Young commented on an interview recently that the internet is like the new "pirate radio"; it's where you hear/see all the cool stuff that the networks won't pay for. 

As creators of performance-based intellectual property (music), I think we have to ask ourselves if our real value is in what we have done (or someone recorded us doing) or what our accomplishments prove we are capable of.  How do the things I've done get people out to see me today and, maybe, get a hard copy of some new unreleased material. 

I think we have to remember that it's not the consumers fault that it's WAY easier to just copy files from friend than to buy them.  Other than a fear of, maybe, breaking the law (depending on where the file came from, it might be perfectly legal to make as many copies as you like) and supporting the team/artist, there is a dis-incentive to doing-the-right-thing.

There are currently a couple of bills before congress that will dramatically expand the censorship capabilities of the US government: SOPA and PIPA. There certainly exists a cultural problem of piracy-acceptance that we all need to work on but legislation like this is easy to corrupt, is almost impossible to get rid of (especially once someone gets their financial mits into it) and has no negative impact on the rich.  The term "class warfare" gets tossed around quite a bit but to me, this stinks of it. 

The HuffPost has a pretty good article on it:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-scheer/sopa-pipa-first-amendment_b_1218349.html?ref=politics

and Google has a petition you can sign:
https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/#utm_source=googlesem&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=signup

but I encourage everyone to watch out for legislation like this and ask "who pays for this?". If the top 1% earners don't share the burden, the remaining 99% are being played.