Considering the very high percentages of online people who fileshare, it could be argued that they aren't breaking any societal rules, though perhaps some capitalistic ones. There may be a societal taboo on discussing filesharing, but everyone's (well, a hell of a lot of people are) doing it nonetheless.
An example are newspapers reporting how bad it is to download movies, but in the same article tell you a Noobs Guide on what programs to use to download, hardware to use to store and to use with your TV to view these movies and who the best uploaders of torrents are concerning High defintion quality movies with full support of the MPAA, Record companies and FACT (Federation Against Copyright Theft). In the same article they state what movies they download with FACT present, something illegal in itself. I would post a link to the news article but then I would be promoting piracy? Weird.