This is not about whether your neighbor is committing wrongdoing in your community, rather whether the system itself, and the edifices that hold it up are conducting themselves in good faith. Without these major players pressuring government to extend the enforced monopolies of copyright longer (that is, robbing the public – you and I – of its catalog of public-domain material) and failing to enforce educational and fair use, we wouldn’t have IP laws at all, and piracy would not be a thing.

Firstly, the neighbor comment I made is an analogy. Nobody is claiming this is about literal neighbors committing wrongdoings in a community. I'm not sure if you've missed my point with that analogy or if you're choosing to willfully misunderstand it here?

Second, what you're claiming here isn't correct when you talk about "what this is about". My comment which you are replying to was not about whether "the system itself, and the edifices holding it up are conducting themselves in good faith" or anything like that. My whole point is about whether "If they make it difficult or impossible to acquire through purchase … I think an argument can be made for surfing the high seas." is good reasoning or not. Nobody is debating you on whether the modern media industries, the government, etc are corrupt or acting in good faith. That has nothing to do with my actual point.

We’re not pirating from the artists. We’re not pirating from our neighbors. We’re pirating from giant corporations who’ve been plying the government for over a century now to strip rights from the public.

You keep jumping back to these points of "well the media corporations, the government, etc did X wrong by us, so we're automatically justified to pirate", that's not how this works. The whole issue is why does that justify piracy? Doubling down and trying to say "BUT I WAS WRONGED!" is not a good argument here. Being wronged in some way does not make it morally acceptable to just do whatever you like.