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Shutting down Kazaa
An anonymous reader writes "There is an interesting wired.com article on the fight between the world's media corporations and Kazaa. The lengths Kazaa has gone to to keep itself immune from attack (incorporated variously in Vanuatu (where?), Estonia and Australia), seem to have largely paid off - until now."
If you're not getting the downloads or results to searchers you used to, it might be because you're "leeching". This little utility (scanned with latest version of AVP, F-Prot, and Orion) maxes out your participation level, allowing you to leech to your heart's content.
http://kazaahack.250x.com
-Christopher Wu
http://www.christopherwu.net/
I have some pr0n movies dl'ing over kazaa. They're going at around 0.5-2k/sec and been going for around a month. If they close it down then damn I'll be pissed.
Kazaa is P2P for the non-power users...I urge everyone to try out eMule / eDonkey....file integrity is next to none other and speed is remarkably impressive (considering the chunk based downloading system). Check it out!
This is a measure/countermeasure race, one that the RIAA/MPAA cannot win. Technology changes faster than litigation can be processed, so for every Kazaa that is shut down, the people who are going to develop the next generation of file-sharing utilities will learn from the mistakes made, both legal and technological, and create better tools. There's only so much that litigation can do to prop up a failing business model.
It's hard to condemn someone and still profit from their popularity.
You do realize that if all everyone did was leech then the entire system would collapse right??
I like the way that Overnet does things. Your max download speed is 4X your upload speed. This forces people to use their upstream bandwidth, even if they're not sharing anything (which is evil in itself) as the temp files are all also shared (so anything you're downloading can be downloaded by other people until it's completed).
How dare you! I plan to RETIRE to Vanuatu! With a land area slightly larger than Conneticut, a total population less than 200,000 people, and an economy based mostly on subsistence farming and, er, shady overseas financial deals (with a little tourism on the side,) what's not to love?
o s/ nh.html
Please note the above comments about shady financial dealings, and ask yourself again why Kazaa is incorporated there.
For more information on vanuatu, see the CIA world Factbook.
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/ge
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
From the article:
Record labels and movie studios want the services closed and fined $150,000 for each illegally traded song or movie.
The dollar figure itself is ridiculous, but I find it interesting that the proposed fine is the same for movies and songs. Let's say the average song is 3 minutes, and the average movie is 90 minutes - i.e. 30 times the length of a song. If the movie fine were $150,000, then the fine for a song should be $5,000 (using duration as the primary factor). If the fine for a song were $150,000, well...
Having said that, I don't believe the labels, et al will collect anything.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Not that i like pirating at all. In fact its one of the biggest habit holding people back from adopting open source. If poeple had to pay the fantasy prices they would be alot swifter to use open source instead of pirating. Likewise pirating is bad for independant artists and cheap labels that nobody cares about. People dont pay so they dont care about lower proces.
Still, trying to stop pirating is totally fruitless. Next in line is shadow networks where no one is tracable. To stop one of those is next to impossible. A filter at each ISP can do the trick but it would be an enourmous task to get that implemented in every country. When its filtered just send your packets in some other protocol like vpn or ssh etc. even if they succeed stopping pirating alltogheter over the internet people still will exchange cds and dvds like back in the 90s but with new types of media.
The cost of stopping pirating is just to big and they should spend that money on relations and better products instead of fitghting the windmills.
HTTP/1.1 400
KaZaA, as we know, is laden with spyware. use kazaalite.
I got curious, so I checked it out. It's a small island nation in the South Pacific. Here's a map, for the interested:
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
These ventures require money. Who will want to risk money on a venture that has a high likelyhood of getting smashed?
Whack-a-mole Napster, Whack-a-mole Kazaa.
Who's next?
The other Ace in the hole that the RIAA has is going after users. Wait till they sue 500 or so of the most pernicious "sharers" at your local university. Would you step in to replace them?
even if they're not sharing anything (which is evil in itself)
If not sharing is considered evil, and a fellow new to movie trading has nothing to share, then for a fellow without a DVD-ROM drive or the video mastering expertise to make a good DivX rip, how is it possible to download one's first movie from Overnet without appearing "evil"?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Fairly simple. Kazaa is a proprietary client using a specific, 'proprietary' protocol[1]. There's only one company behind it, even if the distribution itself is well, distributed.
Now something like Gnutella is going to be near impossible to kill.
[1]proprietary is in quotes here because the very concept of a proprietary network protocol is somewhat questionable. Suffice to say, it's not an openly revealed protocol.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Since when did dialup users contribute in a worthwhile way to P2P? They are slow to upload to and generally dont share anything either.
I'm surprised i don't see more mention of Gnucleus for file sharing. Why don't more people use this? Gnucleus is an open source client for the gnutella network- no ads, no spyware, and no hidden corporations running it. I have been using it successfully for a long time, but whenever i ask others what they use it's always "kazaa". I don't get it.
If the fine for a song were $150,000, well...
It is. Instead of taking actual damages, a prevailing copyright owner can elect to take statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work, as defined in Title 17, United States Code, section 504. And for a sound recording, statutory damages can potentially reach $300,000 because copyrights on two separate works are infringed: the copyright on the melody (owned by the songwriter or by the songwriter's publisher) and the copyright on the sound recording (owned by the band or by the record label).
Will I retire or break 10K?
Um... Even from the article it doesn't look like kazaa will be "going down" any time soon. Sherma nset it up so that it would be pretty much impossible to take apart, wheather or not he was still involved with it. I really don't think the media industry has any idea what they are dealing with. They seem to think that now that they have him it will end. They can do eveything they want to him include kill him and kazaa will live on. They really have nothing but the man who started it. Kudoos to him tho ;)
Creedence Clearwater Revival is the best example of this. They were foolish enough to heed the advice of a label accountant and agreed to shelter their royalties into an offshore corporation under the control of the label - and then stood helpless as they discovered to their horror that the corporation and their money vanished.
And of course the labels continue to refuse to open the accounting books for audits. These practices continue today, through contracts that severely restrict audit policies and reducing the royalty flow to artists to a trickle leaving them with no resources to hire the qualified legal counsel necessary to force the labels to open their books. If you thought Enron or WorldCom were bad...
I find it highly ironic and appropriate that the RIAA is chasing a target who is beating them by using their own tactics through offshore puppet corporations with ghost staff and through countries that do not acknowledge US law. In the end when the RIAA is pointing a finger at KaZaa in court, it should be emphasized that they have three fingers pointing back to them.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
I feel ashamed of my self just for reading your posts.
It's mostly Linux users apparently
Last time I checked, it didn't even build on Windows. This has changed. I don't think many Windows users are willing to 1. download all of giFT's dependencies, which include SSH, CVS, Cygwin, Cygwin Xfree86, Perl, the Ogg libraries, and more; 2. learn how to use Cygwin; 3. configure the dependencies; and 4. compile giFT when they could just go on kazaalite.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It's called protest by lawlessness. The best example I've heard is the speed limit, if they changed the speed limit on highways to 20 MPH, and no one followed it and kept doing 60, they CANNOT fine everyone, and therefor the law would be changed eventually.
Banaaaana!
"Kazaa facilitates ilegal sharing of copyrighted materials. It should have been shut down long ago"
The internet/postal service/phone companies facilitates ilegal sharing of copyrighted materials. It/they should have been shut down long ago.
NOW do you see why your post looks stupid?
i like the blurb where they said that kazaa made millions without spending any money on content. the same could be said of ebay or fedex.
i've never used p2p services, but from a high level kazaa is like a directory service. maybe it does some caching, anonymizing and other kinds of negotiation, but on the whole it's major selling point is that it hooks up different classes of users: producers (well, maybe "data holders" would be better) and consumers.
and it's not all that fair to blame a directory for what its users do wrong. i do find kazaa's "corporate hacks" interesting. they've gone to great lengths to level the playing field on a corporate/legal level. i don't like their tech or their ethics in other areas but they have proved that there are ways for an underdog to fight large corporations.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
Why don't they use an opensource protocol such as OpenFT?
They could only supply a windows gui and throw the ads and spyware on the users. They wouldn't be the driving force behind the protocol so the Music-Industry couldn't sue them for providing a filesharing platform. Am i wrong on this?
cu,
Lispy
Even if they lose every single lawsuit, they can't be shut down. The US or Australia have no way of enforcing anything in Vanatu or Estonia. Besides, Kazaalite can continue to operate even if Sharman were nuked off the face of the earth. Hell, BearShare and other gnutella clients are even more decentralised than Kazaa. What they're doing is like trying to kill a fungus by killing the cell that started it. Going after the companies that make the software is useless, because people will continue to use and distribute the software long after the parent company is gone. Eventually, they'll realize that the ONLY way to stop piracy is to go after individuals and use scare tactics, so the RIAA/MPAA will go on a reign of terror arresting college students who share too many MP3s, movies, etc.
Repeal the DMCA!
I'm surprised i don't see more mention of Gnucleus for file sharing. Why don't more people use this?
On my dial-up connection, I was never able to start even one download with Gnucleus.
I have been using it successfully for a long time
Are you on dial-up or high-speed?
Will I retire or break 10K?
The interesting part of all of this seems to be an underlying belief that every human endeavor must be industrialized. I personally don't pay for shrink-wrapped music, and I never will. I gladly pay musicians by means of a tip charge, cover charge to get into a club, and by buying an occasional CD from the band if they are good. Record companies get nothing from me.
Music isn't an industry, any more than art is. At the moment industry backed music chokes out the independents, leaving you with either corporate music, or having to search for independent music. I would listen to independents more, but I shouldn't have to work that hard to find music. Record labels gained power by getting access to OUR public airwaves and then monopolizing them, and attempts are being made to do the same with the Internet.
I was a musician and lived in Hollywood for a few years. The current system turns music into prostitution, where the only way a band can ever be heard is to prostitute themselves to the labels. The Internet has to potential to return music to its traditional place as folk art, and that is what the labels are out to stop.
Once people realize that music has been with us since the dawn of man, and doesn't need a corporate headquarters to exist and be good, then record companies will finally (and are) lose their grip.
Seriously... I have no respect left of KaZaA or the Music Industry.
KaZaA would do anything to make money. The founders will move to strange countries with strange names. The will look into selling "my" hard-drive space and to physically take control of my computer and display ads that they feel are appropriate. I won't use KaZaA.
The Music Industry would have me buy a cd that may or may not work everywhere that I would want to play it. Simply because they are so insecure about their product and the willingness of people to steal it. I have bought 3 cds in the past year and that was plenty for me to decide that I will never buy a cd again. Empower the user with your product... Don't reduce them down to nothing.
that strange country could be nuked tomorrow and I wouldn't mourn the loss of KaZaA. Good friends, newsgroups, and IRC are 10x better than KaZaA... and I don't even have to look at Ads.
Until now implies that something can be done if the judge rules in favor of Hollywood. This is simply untrue. As you can gather from the article, the CEO of Sharman Networks has not set foot in the U.S. and will not do so. Sure the company is on trial, but all that exists of them in the United States is lawyers. How they expect to get traditionally uncooperative countries to shut down servers I don't know. It will be interesting.
> I happen to be on one hub which requires 100gig verified share and 10mbit of bandwidth...
Which is *very* easy to fake. I can grab dc_gui from here, install it, goto the user prefs tab, goto shares, change the size offset to 150.43 GB (or whatever you want), and add a virtual share directory of my current download directory.
If I really did want to share anything, I could change the QOS settings to low cost IN the client, or add a very small upload bandwidth limit (minimum 0.5 kb/s in it)
Qutoed from the article:
> Estonia, a notorious safe harbor for intellectual property pirates.
That's a bunch of nonsense. The BSA (business software alliance) has a gestapo mentality in this land. They come with the police, they ride your place and they confiscate everything. And they put you into newspaper. There's even a special anonymous phone - call them, tell who to search - and that gives them enough power to go in with a police warrant.
They spread leaflets - "are you a thief, we're soong coming to check you". They have TV ads, fear spam-campaings, etc.
The primary problem with kazaa is that the US courts don't really have jurisdiction here. There isn't much they can do. They tried to get documents using our courts but their request was inconsistent according to the local judges.
I have to agree with Zemran here. I think that the main reason why CD sales have decreased is that THEY ARE TOO EXPENSIVE. With the somewhat recent competition coming from DVDs and Video Games, the music industry MUST show that their products are worth the exorbitant sticker prices charged. It costs less than a dollar for a person to make a CD that ordinarily costs 14 to 19 dollars at a store. Prices are GROSSLY inflated. The RIAA can continue to attack these filesharing services, but they MUST find a way to either lower the price of CDs, add enough value to CDs to merit their price, or do both. If they don't, I expect the record industry to be supplanted by a more consumer-friendly method of distribution. ADAPT OR PERISH.
> Kazaa is, AFAIK, a closed-source proprietary network. This network is presumably written and maintained by a small staff of dedicated programmers.
Unless the protocol is not broken, like it has been in the past (giFT 0.9.x). The main reason that the current protocol hasn't been broken yet is because 1). it's tough and time consuming to do, but not impossible 2). once it's done, the kazaa programmers could easily break it again, which they did in the past (KaZaA 1.3.3)
If the kazaa programmers were taken out of the picture, I'm pretty sure that groups like the "givers" who broke the protocol before, would do it again.
You do realize that if all everyone did was leech then the entire system would collapse right??
Exactly the same argument used by the music and entertainment industries, but they're evil so it's OK to "leech" off them.
Is there a way that can we can just get rid off the MPAA instead.
The JZA
What is FreeNet?
Supposedly, being on the FreeNet provides total anonymity because the protocols are encrypted from the ground up. You can't know where stuff is coming from and where stuff is going. This prevents spying, even by rogue clients. The content on FreeNet is hosted by every computer that is connected to the FreeNet at the time. You have a data store on your computer when you are connected to the FreeNet, but it is encrypted so you can't know what content from the FreeNet is being hosted on your computer (which brings up other issues). Of course nobody else can supposedly tell either.Freenet is a large-scale peer-to-peer network which pools the power of member computers around the world to create a massive virtual information store open to anyone to freely publish or view information of all kinds. Freenet is:
* Highly survivable: All internal processes are completely anonymized and decentralized across the global network, making it virtually impossible for an attacker to destroy information or take control of the system.
* Private: Freenet makes it extremely difficult for anyone to spy on the information that you are viewing, publishing, or storing.
* Secure: Information stored in Freenet is protected by strong cryptography against malicious tampering or counterfeiting.
I don't know the implications, or even if it is a feasible task to port P2P to FreeNet, but I think something like this is a necessary step as time marches on and as the red tape and legal woes thicken. (Maybe the implicit anonymous nature of the FreeNet doesn't allow for the same P2P processes to work -- then again maybe it's ideal) .Right now FreeNet is very slow and the last time I used it (version 0.4) was buggy. However I haven't tried the latest 0.5 release.
Of course this won't necessarily prevent the companies that create and distrubute the P2P software from being prosectued. However it might provide the anonymity that these companies need to distribute their software and keep operating -- provided they don't make themselves known to the public. If they are not known, then nobody can find them. Which begs the question: Then how would these companies get advertising revenue if nobody knows about them? Well, they could advertise on a webpage on the FreeNet and accept credit card payments over the FreeNet, and then the advertiser's content would magically appear in the P2P application. This would take a lot of trust on behalf of the advertisers.
Just a thought. I'd like to hear a response from developers who are involved with the FreeNet project and/or P2P clients about the feasibility of all this.
I had an interesting thought the other day. Hang with me for a moment...
If I hear a song on the radio, and I record it. That is okay. If I record something off the TV antenna, that is also ok.
Now consider companies like Clear Channel, whose only goal is to cover every square inch of the US's surface area with the same radio stations. Theoretically, 88.9 in Podunk, USA, is the same as 88.9 in San Francisco, Tacoma, Buffalo, etc. Now, I'm wandering around, going to work, etc. being bombarded with these radio stations, and these television broadcasts, so, if I were recording everything broadcast to me, I'd probably have copies of all the latest music and some popular television programs. Now suppose, through corporate machinery, prettymuch the same opportunity were available to each and every American Citizen. What copyright gripe could the media companies have?
I realize the nature of copyright is such that I cannot redistribute works that are copyrighted. I can't find it on findlaw, but it seems like someone was caught selling stuff that had been broadcast (the superbowl, I think) that he had recorded. If memory serves, the ruling was something like new audiences were being created for the copyrighted work, audiences the original copyright holder was entitled to. But what if at every corner of the US you can pick up Clear Channel?
Better yet--what if I start a TiVo type service. We make you sign lots of paper work and we verify where you live. We have a computer program and a schedule of all content on broadcasts you can receive. Our computer records it, and lets you download it from our website. I'd expect the FBI to haul me away and lock up the key--but I don't think it is (or should be) illegal. What exactly has happened here? The people we're serving have a right to the content, we've just automated the time-shift of when that content is delivered to them. We'll even include the commercials, though for single songs people might want, this won't work as a lot of radio stations have moved their commercials to about once per hour or once per half-hour.
As far as quality goes, I wonder if Sattelite radio is obscured behind some sort of "terms of service" agreement that you agree to listen in exchange for not recording at all.
Roughly 100% of those I know with broadband pirate stuff.
:p)? That'll be a $130.000+interest, thank you.
Roughly 0% of those I know with dial-up download stuff, they ask those above for a burned CD, but often they don't like asking for hand-outs.
Why? Speed. It's not about whether Napster / KaZaA / WinMX or whatever is easy to use or anything. As more and more people get/want broadband the faster it goes. What RIAA is doing is like playing Whack-A-Mole on a game machine that keeps going faster and faster.
Pretty soon, you can have so much stuff that if you're caught, you're bankrupt. 200gb of mp3s to $2/song (about full retail price here
I'm pretty sure you can manage to do so already with books. Oh that's 200gb of e-books, only 1 kazillion dollars for you.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I don't care about being a power user or not. I want to be on as diverse a P2P network as possible, to have the best chance of find relatively obscure work. Being able to use a back-propagating learning neural network that reassembles fragmented downloads intelligently and learns bad host IDs is useless to me if I am on a P2P network limited to Rush fans.
Quote:
For the entire article, try this
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
The world media corporations are scared to death of the Internet and how file sharing is quickly decreasing their revenue. At some point they are going to realize that the Internet, as we know it today, is their main enemy (rather than just file sharing applications). Don't you think they will try really hard to lobby for killing the Internet? I know, I know, they can and they do sell content on-line, but the threat is too great, and they may push really hard to create a new network with such draconian control that no piracy will take place. Do you think this is a real threat? Will they succeed? As a first step, they could simply buy a few of the major ISPs (most are bankrupt) and impose content filtering. They certainly have enough money to fight this war...
I once came upon some edonkey links while searching for music videos, and decided to give it a try ( to get the videos ). After loading the authors version of Edonkey and doing some searches plus clicking on edonkey link to queue up file, I wound up with nothing. It may have been a config problem, though I searched through message boards and check out issue/resolution posts. Still nothing. I even resorted to the basic searches like *.mpg, *.mp3, etc and still nothing.
In comparison, Kazaa(using Kazaa lite ) may not always turn up what I am looking for. But it is much better than Zero hits, and I think that is due to its popularity. Suprisingly, Shareza does a good job also, though I have to wait a bit to find peers and supernodes to connect to. On linux I have only used Qtella, which also works fine in regards to returning results to my searchs.
I digressed a bit by mentioning other P2P networks, but I am in a comparison mood right now, so I compared all the ones I used so far.
Question - is there a "kazaa-lite" for (Mandrake)Linux? I would love to try out their network while on my favorite OS.
F0rt0r
Sig Impaired and Proud of It!
I can't afford a sig!
I call on all thieves to email their ill gotten gains back to the MPAA. I have about 300GB that I should send back to them and if the rest of you criminals did the same we could solve this scourge on society once and fer-all.
Ah, you took the five steps ahead approch to this. I do not doubt that your doomsday end-result isn't likely to happen, on the contrary, it will happen--it's just a matter of time.
However, this thing we call piracy is nothing new. Closed circle casual piracy, like casual sex will always be around, however now we see a change that's been brewing since Napster came to power, we're now seeing MASS piracy, MASS amounts of people engaging in IP violations. This says something about the media conglomos themselves, this says something about how the consumer trend is changing, and this says something about IP/copyright laws in general.
The sides are polarizing, and what used to be a decent civilization of consumers and content creators has now de-evolved into a new "Wild West".
Let them come, Let the RIAA/MPAA start suing consumers who utilize p2p in their spare time. I don't think you fully understand what kind of shit storm that would rain down on the entertainment industry once this starts. Why do you think they've been trying to shutdown the sites instead of suing the users?? Not because they love us, but because of massively BAD PR. There are MILLIONS, and MILLIONS of p2p file swappers....Some old, some young, some with good paying jobs, some without.
Some with a grudge against the "man" and some who just want to actually get to know what they are buying before they buy it. And there are others in between.
Once you label all these diverse people as "criminals" or "thieves", or even imply that they are (people in the crossfire for example)they will ALL revolt.
And that's not all, there are people in the crossfire here that have nothing to do with p2p that will get hurt too. CD-R taxation, ISP being taxed and therefore the costs are past on to your grandma out in montana on dialup who googles only for cross stich patterns. And when they look at what's going on, they'll blame the person who's behind the jacking of the connection costs--The ISP, and once the ISP gets enough heat on them, then they bitch back at the RIAA/MPAA...then after the news media gets wind of all of this...MORE people try out p2p, and more people see how obnoxious the tactics of the MPAA/RIAA are, and the cycle continues to escalate.
The "general populace" you speak of *is* engaged in this activity.
Far too many people spend time on their polar sides to understand what is going on here. The RIAA is taking fair use away, the MPAA extending copyrights every time they're about to expire, price fixing of CDs, obnoxious bands on payola radio, overly restrictive DRM on CDs, the list goes on and on, but that's just to name a few.
Something has to give or this will fester at a exponetial rate. People will be hunted down and fined/jailed, the RIAA will be bleeding red ink, their will still be fabucated crap on the radio. There will be rallies in the streets and online, mass dissent among consumers, and most of all, new laws that will bring new restrictions on things that we thought were safe.
Look at it this way, the whole p2p idea sprung up out of practically no where, and jetted into the internet's mainstream practically overnight. Yet, the RIAA has been working the same business model for multiple decades. If you don't move fast enough and change enough, your consumers will either fuck you, or leave you. And p2p users who are and who used to be media consumers are doing them both. That tells me that something is wrong on the content holder's side. But that isn't to say they should heed to the "pirate's" wishes, all i'm saying is both sides have better start looking for compromises before it becomes to late.
A Penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off!
The technology behind FreeNet is very cool, very well thought out, except for one thing: searching. You can't really search for arbitrary strings like most apps. They are working on it, but a good solution is yet to come out of it.
There are some indexing services, but they need to grow and get a user community behind them (like FileNexus and ShareReactor for eDonkey/Overnet)
If they got that going, it'd be interesting... but then you would still be restricted to searching in what was in the releases index... which would not reflect everything that is available.
Cheers
The Official Steve Ballmer Webpage
I mean really, you hardly have anything to complain about here, using a quasi-illegal program to share music you shouldn't, by law, be sharing in the first place. Please feel free to drop the hypocritical facade any time your ready. So while you engage in semi-illegal file transfers, people are leeching files from you in a similar manner. I call that "Irony".
Move along, nothing to see here.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
One does wonder why Usenet is yet to be sued. It far predates Napster. Does it in some way pass a legal challenge that Napster didn't, or is it considered just too arcane for Joe College-Student to use in ripping off the starving record companies?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Let's not go throwing around insults without understanding what they mean.
"...committing priacy and copyright..."
Both of these are violations of the law, but so what? Law is not the same as Right, and in fact, it has often been the opposite. It's possible to argue that music sharing amounts to civil disobedience, which all political theorists (who are not currently in power) will tell you is a Good Thing. Let's remember that a Good Thing is what's best for people in general, not what's best for the coorporations.
Here's how to make that argument:
Obviously, the system won't work if everyone gets their music for free. The recording companies won't make any profit, and people in general won't hear well-recorded music at all. This, however, does not by itself justify the bullshit that recording companies are putting us through. It is entirely possible for most people to get their music for free, and a few to pay for it.
People like CDs. They like the package, the booklet, the pictures. So, it's likely that of the people who download lots of free music, those of them who can afford to will buy the CDs they particularly like. Since about $17 of every $20 CD is pure profit for the record company, they really don't have to sell to a very high percentage of their audience. Some people say that this is the reason why record sales were at a peak before Napster died, and have dropped off since. I, personally, bought 5 of the 7 RIAA CDs I own because I heard the music first for free, illegally.
That would lead us to believe that we'd all be better off with filesharing/ piracy, even the giant rich companies everyone hates. Besides, making it illegal is like prohibition - now the only people who purvey shared files are themselves criminals, and can't be trusted. We all know what Kazaa tries to do to our computers.
<rant>
Another (moderatly less convincing) way to make this argument is to say that those &^%*& record companies shouldn't charge so much. Maybe if they charged a reasonable amount, like $7, for each CD, more peopel would buy. The reason this is less likely to convince is that free market capitalists will argue that the all-knowing public in this, our idealized capitalistic economy, would have counteracted any selfish moves of the businesses and prices will have already reached their equillibrium. The fact is that this just isn't true; the music industry, just like most others in America, is an oligopily, which functions just like a monopoly except that it avoids the letter of the law against monopolies.
</rant>
PUBLIC SPLIT ON WHETHER BUSH IS A DIVIDER -CNN scrolling banner, 10/15/2004