Copyright infringement is rampant bacause: a) it's so damn easy to do, and b) the laws are so damned hard to enforce.
Exactly. It has nothing to do with today's generation having a greater sense of entitlement to the intellectual property of others than prior generations, today's generation is merely able to infringe upon those rights with greater ease and on a larger scale than prior generations.
No, that's not true. The ease with which intellectual property rights can be violated with impunity has fostered a greater sense of entitlement. The easier it is to steal, and the less obvious the impact of stealing on the person being stolen from, the less theft seems like theft.
To argue otherwise is to argue that surveillance and punishment are the only things preventing universal criminality: that everyone would break the law, all the time, if they could do so with no chance of being caught and punished.
That's plainly not true. Most people obey the law simply because they've been taught to obey the law. To choose the most obvious example: most people will continue to obey traffic laws, even when there's no other car in sight, let alone a police officer.
If people feel entitled to steal, and to seek rents from others, it can only be for two reasons. Either they were not properly socialized in the first place, or they have gone through a form of counter-conditioning.
That counter-conditioning is provided by the very act of illegal downloading. Every time you do it, you condition yourself to see it as a normal and acceptable activity--until finally, you're inventing elaborate rationalizations for your own criminality, like the one you posted above. "Not only is everybody doing it--everybody else would have done it too, throughout history, if they'd just had the technology!"
The fact is, everybody else throughout history was generally poor, lived under an undemocratic, authoritarian state, and was denied basic economic, political, and religious liberties that we take for granted in the modern West. Under such a regime, when the law itself was unjust, violating the law was a justifiable act of resistance.
In eighteenth-century France, books had to be smuggled across the border from Switzerland, like drugs, and the regime classed Enlightenment philosophy in the same legal category as pornography and libel. People brave enough to actually break the law and read the works of the philosophes bought pirated editions because, in many cases, they were the only editions available.
The people breaking intellectual-property law in the modern West aren't heroic resisters. Their rights aren't being violated, and they're not fighting the power. They're the spoiled children of wealth and privilege--the modern global equivalent of the pre-Revolutionary French aristocracy. And like aristocrats throughout history, their sense of entitlement to the fruits of other people's labours knows no bounds. There's the
real historical parallel you should have drawn.