So do the people who make B and C. If the people who made A made an attractive enough product, made it easy enough to get, made good promotion for it, etc... maybe they would take back some of those B and C sales?

You know, I think you're really just assuming music is being hit much harder than the other industries here. I don't know if you've read my follow up post (answer to Atari), but I think movies are being torrented WAY more than music. You're entire argument is based on the unproven assumption that music has a tougher time standing up to piracy. I don't believe so, and in all honesty, I have yet to see (non-industry sponsored) statistics that back this up. Me personally, I never download music. There's very little need with legal and mostly free services like Spotify available to me. I do download roughly 100GB of TV series and movies every month, but that's not even illegal here in Belgium and most of Western Europe. But let me tell you something, I rarely buy a CD anymore either. There's just nothing good enough to own that's being released on major labels anymore these days. Last album I bought was by a Belgian band called Ostend Powers, who I had to e-mail to get the album as they don't have a record label. Their album was recorded & mixed in two weeks in a pro studio for 300€ a day, and the production value is through the roof. They've sold around 1000 CD's by now, at 10€ per disc. I dunno, that seems to work for me.

I think in 2012 the "size" argument no longer applies really.

I don't know where you get the 17% figure, but at it's height in 2006-2007 the gnutella network had roughly 4-5 million active "nodes" (extrapolation, last known figure as 3 million in january 2006). Nothing compared to Napster.

I agree  that the growth of the phenomenon is gradual, but almost as a direct result of that the impact should have been immediate whenever one of the biggest services was shut down. It wasn't.

Yes, porn is responsible for quite a large chunk of day-to-day internet traffic . But again, if there is a real correlation between sharing and music sales, we should see a huge rise in music sales over the coming weeks & months. Interesting times indeed.

I'm saying that government intervention through SOPA/PIPA would be on the same plane as government regulation forbidding iTunes. Not saying they are doing this, it would be too silly for words. But so were SOPA/PIPA.

One more, just to be sure. An independent study in Sweden shows that file sharers and non-sharers buy roughly the same amount of CD's, however file sharers buy MORE singles from legal sources like Amazon & iTunes than non-sharers. Again, show me the correlation between sharing and the decline of the music industry.
(oh, by the way, source: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201111 … hand.shtml )

Factors that are MUCH more likely to be reason for the downfall:
- The lack of quality being pushed by big labels
- Focus on singles instead of albums
- No big national network to promote music anymore (wtf MTV?!??)
- Unrealistic pricing schemes
- Economic downturn
- Audiences with shorter attention span, lots more one-hit wonders
- ...

Well, okay, you make a fair point sir. The threshold to pirating games is definitely a bit higher than the threshold to pirating music. I don't agree about music vs video though... not at all. The majority of pirated stuff just happens to be video, check this top 100 on pirate bay: http://depiraatbaai.be/top/all

That said, I should have expressed myself differently, what I said was not exactly what I meant to say. What is probable more correct is that I think that if there was a real one-on-one correlation between piracy and a downturn in the entertainment industry you would see it happen for video, music and games alike. Maybe not to the same degree, but the trends should at least show a visible change on key points in history, such as the Napster shutdown. It just doesn't.

I might be oblivious to the specifics here, but I do not believe there is an actual distinction in the law between "design" for clothing which is considered an artistic expression & music or film. Are you sure you're not referring to trademark law (logo design falls in that category).

Oh, but it does. And don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating that musicians should do their stuff for free. I think we should throw out the industry around it and start paying the musicians instead. You know, for their gigs, or even for their recorded music. Maybe the mucisian can monetize by selling their songs for ads, for other media, etc... As long as we don't pay for the studio bosses, record labels, etc... who no longer play a relevant role in today's society.

That's not scale; scale is about numbers. You're talking about severity or degrees of severity which is expressed by the "what" question (punching vs shooting), not by the "how many" question. I also disagree with you that the volume has actually increased that much.

Ok...so to this I say...

Well, that's actually more about skill. And I would be inclined to say that the skill required to write a good song is a lot more important in the overall quality of the product. I have a Logic rig, and I can churn out 100% pro sounding stuff, it's just my song writing that's not up to snuff and the reason why I'm not "hitting it big".

Well, you could consider it marketing money for your concerts, that would be peanuts in comparison. That said, as mentioned before, I don't think it should be free. It should be much cheaper than what it is today and it should be within a price range that can be covered by ad revenue.

Do you have a source for this? Do you have non-industry funded research that shows the correlation between piracy and a drop in music sales? In reality, no study has been able to show that sharing has had a major impact. In reality, the average person's monthly entertainment budget has remained pretty much constant over the past decade. It might have shifted from albums to singles or to on-demand TV or video games; but the overall budget is roughly the same. Isn't a bit of a stretch then to claim all those lost revenues for the entertainment biz?

Nobody is talking about dropping IP. It's about sanitizing IP to be more in-line with society's demands and sensitivities; I think we both agree on that, but we disagree on the direction the sanitizing should go.

And that's another thing we DO agree on

No and no. First of all, you're not stealing anything if the other person is not losing anything. Equating piracy to stealing is like equating yelling at someone to beating the crap out of them... both of them might not be much fun but I think we both agree they're in a different ball-park altogether. There's nothing actually lost in the case of sharing (which is a much less negatively charged word for "piracy").

Second, technology is always going to progress beyond what you can predict so using that as a benchmark for what is legal and what is not is not a good place to start from.

Maybe a bit of a history lesson is in order... 'cause what most people seem to forget is that the only reason why copying music seems to have lost public moral support is because for a very long time they (the industry) controlled the entire supply chain and duplicating anything without their permission in an acceptable quality was basically impossible. Along came the compact cassette, the miniDisc, the CD-R and eventually the internet and changed that. At that point, there was a whole period in time during which technology existed to copy without any specific laws against it (except basic copyright law). Industry started lobbying the US government to do something about the unauthorized copying and reselling of their music (rightfully so), hoping it would have the collateral impact of wiping out sharing as well (wrongfully) as they saw that as a growth opportunity for them. Luckily, the audio home recording act (1992) specifically allowed sharing and other fair use scenarios, much to the industry's dismay. In 1992, so no exact copies could be made at that point (well, DAT was around since 1987 but too expensive for most and miniDisc was only released that year) and they just basically dropped it. Only since the internet and the CD-R have they slowly started molding public opinion to frown on sharing as something immoral and illegal but in most countries, it just wasn't. In came the DMCA making it illegal to circumvent copy protection, but not the actual act of copying, as that to this day is still 100% legal. In most countries, you can actual share your own copies with your friends and family as well under fair use policies. But somehow, the RIAA has gotten us all to believe that such a thing is despicable.

Did you know that if Channel designs a frock anyone can take their design, copy it at verbatim and sell it as their own? The only thing they can't do is copy the logo/name but that's because of trademark law, not copyright. So why is the music industry somehow better than the fashion industry?

Or maybe people are more easily persuaded by an artist's point of view? http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2012/01/21/megaupload/

On the broader issue of piracy I'd say that "piracy" and home copying is the nett result of an open demand-and-supply economy and I for one support it.

The whole business model of the content industry is based around the fact that they control supply. Unfortunately for them, technology has progressed in such away (as tends to happen) that this control has shifted towards the people. Instead of fighting to keep control by lobbying for new legislation maybe the industry should have chosen more customer friendly ways of creating additional value? Maybe they should shift focus back to performances instead of recordings?

I mean, in all honesty, the government didn't try to stop the advent of the automobile although it had a severe impact on the livelihood of farriers. Demand for horse shoes has gone way down since the late 1880's, but these people either moved on to other businesses or stayed and found their place in the niche their market had now become. That's just the way society progresses.

Anyways, the entire recorded music industry is only worth around $28 billion, including retail and distribution (so it's fair to say that the music creation industry is going to be a fair bit smaller than that estimate). Google alone is worth almost double that, why do these relatively small businesses wield such great power over the legislative process in the US and internationally? Universal Music is only worth around $6 billion, Sony music a bit less and Warner only $3 billion.

Google has $26 billion in CASH, they could theoretically just buy the music industry as a whole, give the product away for free and it would still make perfect business sense for them... obviously, this would never get regulatory approval but it's a thought exercise worth doing for the arrogant pricks at Universal, Sony & Warner music groups. Time for them to get their feet back on the ground and realize the real value of what they're doing.