One of the many debates spurned by technology has been the morality of file-sharing and piracy. David Pogue of the New York Times wrote last week about his talks to various groups where he discovered a surprising reaction to these ethical questions. First he spoke with groups of varying ages and asked which of many hypothetical situations were wrong, like borrowing a CD from the library or making a backup copy of a DVD, or replacing your 2,000 vinyl records with copies of CDs from the library. Pogue says as he went through scenarios, more and more hands went up showing a lot of gray areas to the debate.

Then Pogue spoke to a college audience. He went through the same list and says no more than two hands ever went up out of 500 people. Even when he went for the extreme “You want a movie or an album. You don’t want to pay for it. So you download it.” Only two hands.

Pogue’s unscientific but nevertheless revealing social study shows not only is the file-sharing debate more complicated than media companies claim, but there’s a generational gap in how people view the moral debate. Simply, young people don’t think file-sharing is wrong.

Certainly the propaganda war hasn’t slowed the practice. Even with the threat of lawsuits against users and file-sharing services, file-sharing continues to grow. Pirate Bay, the largest tracker of BitTorrent files, reports their user base and the number of torrent files they share has almost doubled. Pirate Bay, who tracks an estimated 50 percent of all public torrent files, has stood out among file-sharing sites for its willful defiance of copyright laws and legal threats.

The media companies’ war on piracy has long been a futile effort, much like the wars on drugs and poverty. How do you convince someone to pay for something they can get for free so easily. Piracy continues to spread because it gets easier, faster, and more reliable. There still is no online movie download service that provide enough content at a reasonable price and quality to even consider. iTunes is one of the best options around, but the movie quality and selection is limited. And 99 cent songs sounds nice, but when you can fit 10,000 of those on an iPod, 99 cents suddenly becomes daunting. And how do you validate 99 cents when you can get the same for free (without limiting DRM).

College students and younger media consumers have gotten used to the technology changing the market. Digital media has turned limited plastic discs into infinite digital memory. Once something is infinite, how can you assign a dollar value to it. Supply and demand goes out the window when there is no limit to the supply. And saying creators need to be rewarded for their work is a moral argument, not a business one.

So in my fantasy world, the media companies will read this and realize wow, no matter how much we fight it, the next generation of media consumers is not going to want to pay for content, so we’d better figure out new ways of making money, whether through advertising, product placement, or merchandise (stuff that’s a limited supply compared to the demand). But the truth of course is there will be more lawsuits, more government welfare for big media’s outdated business models, and frustration from consumers who are made the enemies of the media they enjoy so much, they’re willing to break the law for it.