As soon as the contents of the file are in my bought-and-paid-for-with-no-fine-print-just-like-a-fork-or-a-knife video card's display buffer, I have taken ownership of them, Talmudic legal fictions notwithstanding. A copy is made in all cases, whether for my own viewing after I have been properly bled (Officially Blessed variant) or obtained from a warez site, with intent to distribute to the entire population of China (Officially Not Blessed.) The physical process which took place is the same.

No argument about the cloud. Once you store data on a hostile machine, others may read, delete, modify, etc. it. The only machine which contains data that can be meaningfully called “yours” is your own.

Whether I have absolute control over the fate of bits on a device which I bought and physically possess is, in fact, an either-or question. Either my computer is built to disobey my orders to benefit a hostile third party, or it is not: http://glyf.livejournal.com/46589.html

> But we both agree that the “easy” solution is not a solution at all

There are only two long-term solutions: a ban on true general-purpose computing (the logical conclusion of DRM efforts) or the complete abandonment of artificial scarcity. The latter could involve a clever social hack (i.e. the “ransom” model) or a reversion to the (historically dominant) situation of largely unpaid creativity.