This article seems to imply that you can never change people's behavior by law (i.e. like posting a sign on a door saying not to throw towels on the floor) because people will always do whatever they want. I don't think I agree with that--I think the quesiton is to what extent are entities willing to impose penalties and enforce the law to sufficiently change people's behavior. For example, obviously if the company in the hypothetical hired a guy to sit in the bathroom to make sure that people threw paper towels in the trash can and then fired people who disobeyed, far fewer people who throw paper towels on the floor.

So, the issue as related to piracy is not necessary that people would never change their behavior, its just that the cost of monitoring behavior and enforcing currently existing law/creating new law to effect such a behavioral change ("don't pirate stuff") is extraordinarily high. Right now, the strategy of the media industry appears to be to spend money under the presumption that the amount of money they spend enforcing/lobbying/trying to pass laws to prevent piracy makes economic sense: they will gain/save more money than they spend. This seems unlikely, but probably people have punched the numbers for these companies and concluded that this is the case. The radical alternative approach is to completely rethink the distribution and pricing scheme, and focus less on margins but more on quantity--distribute the content to as many people as possible, but make fewer $/product. To impose that would require either some fairly revolutionary thinking in companies that have repeatedly shown a hesitancy to innovate (and would require them to abandon a strategy now that still makes hefty profits), or to make media companies hurt to such an extent that they have no alternative (which, right now, does not appear to be happening).