Arrrrggh Mateys!
Been pirating for years. Had a few DMCAs over the time because of it. A lot of what is commented here is true. Points:
- The "big" pirates are people who have not and will never pay for music. So these supposed financial woes are not "losses", they are "never were"s. The smaller pirates will be scared away by a single ISP suspension or threatening letter and are usually just "sampling" potential buys anyways.
- Your typical pirate knows more about the internet and computers than the people trying to enforce the antiquated laws he/she is breaking. Be it some watchdog hired by a movie studio to rip IPs from torrent trackers, to lawyers flinging their flimsy and unfounded lawsuits about. Every time they think they've got it on lockdown, a new technology that has been underground for 6 months already pops up.
- There are conflicting ideas in this battle against piracy. The internet is about the open and free exchange of data. Copyright is about restricting said data. The 'right holders' can kick and scream all they want, but they are NOT going to be able to stop piracy on the internet any more than they can make water flow uphill. At most, they can hope to slow it down until it evolves yet again.
- The amount of money these 'right holders' make is already outstanding. An artist 200 years ago could only dream of making ends meet for his or her work. Now we got these super stars living the high life by packaging and selling the remixed mush of better art to the brain dead masses. The good stuff is free anyways.
My insane solution: Create an open source software project for a program that can generate the pop crap coming out now-a-days by applying randomness to simple musical theory. I bet the computer will come up with more originals than some of these so-called artists. At that point, their copyrights will be worthless and we can stop giving our ISPs excuses to throttle our bandwidth.