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I'm not even going to waste my time arguing with you, so I'm just going to paste what I said in another forum:

How much did they pay you to write this crap? Do you seriously think that one lousy court ruling is going to end file-sharing? You are as delusional as your corporate puppets are.

P.S. I'm a pirate too...whoohoo...careful...

Edited 2009-04-17 21:55 UTC

Oh boy! Maybe we'll see Google fall to the media companies next! Search for anything and include "torrent" in your search terms, and who needs The Pirate Bay? I'm sure there are billions of .torrents in Google's cache too. Same goes for Yahoo, and even Microsoft (though using their Live search is about as pleasurable and useful as sawing your own foot off).

This decision is a loss for everyone, perhaps especially the media companies. They've just moved the arms race to the next phase. Now that it's illegal to host a search engine, technologies like Tor will become more prominent. Distributed torrent indexing anyone? Setting up a whole P2P web-ecosystem, outside of the usual definition of "server" and "client" wouldn't be too hard. There are many P2P protocols out there already.

Y'know I have purchased maybe two or three music CDs in my life. I own hundreds of movies, however - legally mostly ( I buy them when the prices fall to where they should be ($5 or less) ).

I am a pirate - I even frequented The Pirate Bay.

I download my movies now when they are new because I do not have time to waste at a nasty movie theater ( nasty, smelly, imbecile humans ) and I am not about to be forced to wait months and months before a legal DVD version is available.

I remember back in the day when the internet was barely even called such a thing and a reoccurring discussion could be heard from almost any American's mouth: how to evolve with times.

I specifically remember when file sharing started taking off - for music in almost complete exclusivity - and the immediate recognition that the recording industry would need to evolve so as not to be overwhelmed by the freedom of 'archivable' data transmission.

The math done by experts predicted that the industry would face a hard time if they failed to act to provide a legal and simple manner by which their product could be purchased in a digital format. The recording industry looked at the up-front cost of evolving versus their profit margins and stock holder expectations and elected, instead, to remain idle ( at their OWN peril ).

At that time dial-up was the norm, and it would take more than an hour or so to download a single song. The internet was a much smaller world, with AOL being thought of as being the internet itself. Then came Napster. And the news stories. And the lawsuits.

The correct reaction would have been to out compete AND file suit. Instead the industry decided to simply file a lawsuit. The kids behind Napster said in, IIRC, their first interview that they tried to talk to various heavy-weights in the industry but were unable to get them to understand the concepts of non-physical mediums as a profitable venture.

Napster should have been ad-funded, with a different ad for each song downloaded, with proceeds split between Napster and the recording companies & artists. These old-school idiots saw that they only would make up to a few cents per download - they didn't get that they would have a much larger pool of buyers with considerably lower production costs and even lower distribution costs.

They didn't realize that a $3 profit for each of a million album purchases paled in comparison to 50 cents per album with what would easily be 100 million downloads of the biggest favorites. Little did they also fail to realize that many will prefer the physical medium regardless of the price or the digital alternative - audiophiles & the general populace in fact.

Even today, with the many alternative ways of pirating any given product, most sales are in line with the underlying economic and political environment. Some media has taken a larger hit from this, as it was so destined.

Any given sell item is destined to see less sells if they have become relatively more difficult to purchase. It doesn't matter even if the item is or is not otherwise available, a fall in sells will happen if it is harder to purchase.

Now, the bar for access is simply typing a few keys and a couple clicks of a mouse button - then you have access to ALL the songs you can find. And you also have movies, games, etc....

That is a LOW bar. The price is only a part of the picture. A rather small part, overall ( as is being proven with the iPod fad ). Access is key.

Just think about it. I don't own an mp3-player, I don't have a use for one. I have a radio in my car and a bunch of computers and a TV which is connected to one of my computers. This is an increasingly common scenario. I don't own a CD player, I don't think. That is odd, certainly. Heck, my only working DVD players are in computers. I do have an old tape deck system, though - and a few tapes.

I am not old, I am only 27. I'm not stuck in the past, simply I'm in the near future already. In order for me to LEGALLY purchase any given album, I have to get in my car and drive AT LEAST 25 miles or so, then I have to HOPE the store has what I want. I have to deal with partially uplifted & slightly evolved lemurs the entire time, doing my best to wake a few of them from their stupor just so I can get away from their painful theta-heavy energy fields.

THEN, I have to drive home again. I can't enjoy my CD in the car - I only have a tape deck which doesn't work anymore ( though the radio is good enough ). Once home, I can't play the CD until I have started the process of encoding the data into a longer lasting format ( though at least I can do this at a nice 320kbps ) which is also much more accessible to where I listen to my music most - at home ( anywhere at home, in fact ).

Then, I finally put the CD on my desk, where it adds to the clutter of CD cases and other current paraphernalia until I finally sort things up and throw the disc into a plastic bin for physical archival.

All that, normally just for a single song - maybe two. Which brings me to the final point.

Are YOU really willing to pay $20 for a single song? Considering most people only like one or two songs per album, $20 has become too high of a price to pay. Back in the day $20 was all their was. That was a monopoly on the medium. That has ended.

Now more and more artists are getting smart and embracing the internet, as has Apple with their silly little store. The model ain't a bad one, but the prices are still too high. It will slowly break under its own weight, but that pressure will merely lead to lower prices and greater users. The happy medium will be found.

Remember - there are 7 billion potential customers in a fully connected world.

--The loon

PS - yeah, I rambled on...and on... and ....

EDIT: eh, geez.. how'd I miss that??

Edited 2009-04-18 08:37 UTC