It is completely unbalanced. The intent of this intellectual property system is to give more power to the content producers, while reducing the public domain. The idea behind these laws used to be to give incentives to create and publish new things, but the creations would also become available for others to work with (public domain). Lobbying pressure turned this into a system where copyrights last so long that, unless something changes, none of us will ever see anything created today becoming part of the public domain. Take Disney for example, they profited enormously from the public domain (i.e. lifted most of their stories from it) but lobby hard for copyright extensions for their own work. Even if they do go into the public domain, laws that ban "circumvention devices" ensure that nobody will be able to legally do anything with them, even though they have the right.
Also, note that several libertarian economists believe intellectual property, quite unlike real property, is generally harmful.
http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/15_2/15_2_1.pdf
This is not related to "cable theft", which requires tampering with infrastructure that is someone else's property.