It is if you use your belief to say "Well then, I won't pay them what they've asked". Too many people seem to think a "belief" is justification for breaking the law (AKA "agreement made by society"). A belief is fine - fantastic even. All big change comes from passionate beliefs. However, we have a system in place for affecting this change. It's "discuss in public fora, create political will, and change the law". Or even "download in public, get prosecuted, take punishment and create public will to change the system based on ridiculous nature of punishment to crime". It's emphatically not "Use anonymising proxies to download Hollywood blockbusters whilst claiming I'm standing up for political principles".

It is a mistake to think that people against IP are just a bunch of kids ripping off content for free from [insert favorite bittorrent tracker]. For me personally, I pay for much of the media I consume.

My concerns with IP are more wide reaching, particularly with respect to the medical and agriculture industries. (And more personally, the software industry.) The book I cited, "Information Feudalism," chronicles this to a (horrifying) extent. In broad terms, countries rich in IP use it to extort developing countries.

I recognize the OP of this article sets the context with youthful apathy that can be annoying, but you shouldn't assume that the only criticisms of IP are selfishly trite.

To a secondary point, I don't think civil disobedience is a bad thing. But I agree that claiming civil disobedience while downloading the latest Game of Thrones episode is a bit incredulous.

> It is if you use your belief to say "Well then, I won't pay them what they've asked".

It seemed to me that you were equating "lack of IP" with "content creators aren't rewarded from the fruits of their labor." I was stating that this was a false equivalency. A lack of IP merely means that there is no body of law enforcing the notion of ownership over ideas.