Copyright law (Score 1)

The following are two IMO noteworthy points in German copyright law (disclaimer: IANAL), which seem quite reasonable to me; so take this both as a description and suggestion:

• You can legally make so-called Private Copies of any copyrighted material, which includes sharing it with your friends. (This doesn't mean file-sharing is legal, though, because there you're publishing stuff [to the general public], not just sharing with a friend.)

  You can also create private recordings of TV or radio.

  This avoids criminalizing private persons while still enforcing the interests of the copyright holders, and it solves the OP's problem that "it's hard to avoid breaking the law nearly every day".

• Copyright expires after a long time, typically 70 years after the death of the creator.

  Since many people in this discussion asked for a shorter expiration time, I'd like to note that I've never found this to be a problem, and even some software I'm currently using (on my Linux box) is older than 20, let alone 10, years.

(It's quite similar in the other EU countries, I suppose.)

In case you're interested on my point of view, I'm running a Linux box (with almost only open source software), and I'm developer of an open source project myself.