If it doesn't feel wrong, is it wrong?

"I don't feel I'm doing something wrong." So said Eamon Cannon, an 18 year old high school student during an hour long seminar hosted by United States Attorney General Alberto B. Gonzales on digital piracy. Cannon, a child of privilege whose divorced parents are both successful actors in Hollywood, attends an exclusive private school on Los Angeles' upscale Westside was defending his illegal downloading of movies and music from file-sharing sources on the internet.

Now if this spoiled, entitled computer pirate were to walk into a Blockbuster Video store, I feel confident that he would not begin to even consider taking a wrapped DVD movie that he wanted, slip it underneath his sweater, remove the protective marking that would set off any alarm and then walk out the door without paying for it. That would be a crime known as shoplifting. For some reason that only Eamon can explain to us, the difference between shoplifting and digital piracy somehow makes one a crime and the other nothing more than something that isn't doing anything wrong. This moral relativism is why digital piracy is the pervasive problem that it is, and it is why government faces such a difficult task in trying to stop it.

As long as the majority of teens feel as Eamon does, any serious effort to try to stop digital piracy is doomed to fail before it begins.