I'm not sure that the cognitive dissonance is in the ease of committing the tort, rather, I suspect that "intellectual property" doesn't really fit most (non-technical) people's concept of what ought to be tortable.  For most non-technical people (my mom, for example), having a thing implies the right to share it.  When we treat a song or a piece of software or a movie as a "thing" we feed into this conception.  Of course we, as technical people, know that it isn't really a thing.  That in fact it's a licensing agreement granting you the limited ability to use information in certain ways.  But that idea is complex, and not really well understood by most people (even technical people), and so we abstract it as "a thing" (intellectual property).<p>So when some poor soul winds up incurring 60k of damages just for clicking a button to trade "free" music of course this comes as a surprise.  All of a sudden their mental model of "things" has broken down with no real warning that the level of damage could hit such extremes so quickly or that a harm was even being committed.<p>If we lived in a just society, the law would be re-evaluated to fit the ideas of right and wrong commonly held by the people (including content creators of course).  Instead we will attempt to force a lossy abstraction on everyone and accept the inevitable unjust consequences.