OK, this has the feel of a troll bob, but I’ll see if I can address your concerns.

1) copyright infringement falls under criminal statutes in limited cases in some jurisdictions — in most of the world, copyright infringement is a civil matter between the person whose copyright is infringed and the person doing the infringing. This, of course, puts undue burden on both the rights holder and the alleged infringer, but there’s no easy solution to that.

So, saying infringement is a crime is misleading. Infringement /may be/ a crime, depending on the circumstances.

2) There’s nothing wrong with killing jobs for artists. And why pick on artists? Every bit of “speech” created by anyone, any time, in limited countries, is covered by copyright protection.

In other words, this post is covered by copyright, as is yours. However, my job’s not going to be “killed” by someone copying this and re-posting it elsewhere.

Likewise, I’ve produced a fair bit of music at my own expense, and while it might kill some artist’s job (if people decide to listen to my stuff instead of theirs), the act of copying my work won’t deprive me of anything. I’d probably get upset if someone tried to pass it off as their own and sell it for a profit, but they haven’t deprived me of anything, as I had no agreement with anyone ahead of time that there was going to be any sort of payment regarding the work.

Recording studios work on speculation — producing a film or audio recording is a form of gambling similar to insurance — they produce a bunch of flops, but use statistical models that predict that the stuff that really takes off will more than cover those costs. And as far as that goes, that means that any copying of the flops has zero impact on the production houses. The artists themselves have already entered into a contract with the studios and have given up their copyrights, so they really don’t have much of a say here.

3) Sharing this or that: Any creative work is a rip-off of something that came before. There’s pretty much no way to avoid this, and you even get two independent people producing really similar works on a regular basis. They’re not necessarily copying each other — they’re copying what came before. This is part of what it means to live in a culture or a society. This is how people naturally function, and copyright is a construct designed to impede this for a temporary time to give limited monopolies to people to encourage them to create more works.

Well, there’s the blathering. What about the end of the day?

I think I already pointed out, sharing isn’t a crime — there is criminal sharing, but that’s just like there’s criminal shooting: the intent in both cases, as well as the result, matters MUCH more than the act, which is in itself a neutral thing.

4) Big crime: Yes, it can be a big crime if it’s been defined to be and accepted by law. But making copies is not the same as copyright infringement. If I have five kids, I’ve made five copies of my DNA. Likewise, I can make five copies of a DVD. That’s my perogative. However, as soon as I start distributing either DVDs or children to others, I start to get into legal difficulties. And if I deal in DVD or child trafficking (distributing in volume over time), it becomes a criminal issue. But in most countries, it is THIS act that is a serious crime, not the prior act of making copies.

5) IP should be treated seriously. This means that people should treat intellectual property as its own entity with its own rules and issues and not try to conflate it with contract law, unfair competition, criminal behaviour, and actions against finite resources.

Creating something does not give you the right to be compensated by someone — contracts are used for that.
In your examples:
a) supplying more than a million copies of some movie — this would be a SINGLE act of mass distribution, comprising more than a million instances of copyright infringement.
b) robbing a million banks — this would be a million cases of robbery (taking a physical thing of value belonging to someone else without their consent) — but THAT would be further compounded because a bank is somewhere that holds other people’s things — so on top of robbing the bank, you’re also stealing something finite of value from each person who stored it in the bank — something that unlike watching a movie, can be returned.
c) hijacking a truck with a million DVDs in it: the crime here is hijacking the truck — it could be empty, and it would still be a crime. There would be FURTHER crimes if the person then distributed the contents for free to first-comers, or started selling them on eBay. But at no point did they duplicate anything, so the crime would have nothing to do with copyright; it would have to do with dealing in stolen goods.

6) Which folks deserve to be in jail exactly? Everyone who has committed the offense of sharing intellectual property without the express permission of the copyright holder? That’d be everyone in the world.

Or is it everyone who infringes copyright that should go to jail? Good luck being recompensed for any perceived losses if the person who infringed your copyright is locked away from society but still has access to your intellectual property (as jails have internet, show movies, etc.).

Or is it everyone who infringes copyright in a criminal manner? You might be slightly closer to the point here, but remember points 1-5 above. Locking people up for being an active part of society doesn’t sound like a good plan. Locking them up for being detrimental to society by consistently exhibiting anti-societal behaviours such as profiting off of materials supposedly under the care of another without due compensation? Here we might be getting somewhere.

But in this article, we’re not talking about any of this: this article is talking about collecting private data on all citizens for the express purpose of snooping on all of them to see if they’re guilty of civil copyright infringement.

See the problem? YOU are guilty of civil copyright infringement; the only difference between you and the guy bootlegging DVDs is in variety, scale, intent, and consequence to others in society. THESE are the things that police should be targeting, not sifting through the entirety of online interactions looking for some that might not be on the up-and-up between an individual and a foreign production company.

That said, Dallas Buyer’s Club actually has one good point, and something I agree with: the new system will require ISPs to store their data in a defined way, which means they’ll have to respond to the police with “do you have a warrant?” instead of “Oh, I’ll try to find something for you, but there’s no guarantee we even still have it.” I think this is a GOOD thing, as people (and companies) will have to be more transparent as to what they will and won’t do — and hopefully this will also require LEOs to be more transparent with judges, citizens and corporations as well.