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RIAA Must Divulge Expenses-Per-Download
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The Court has ordered UMG Recordings, Warner Bros. Records, Interscope Records, Motown, and SONY BMG to disclose their expenses-per-download to the defendant's lawyers, in UMG v. Lindor, a case pending in Brooklyn. The Court held that the expense figures are relevant to the issue of whether the RIAA's attempt to recover damages of $750 or more per 99-cent song file, is an unconstitutional violation of due process."
Oh don't worry, they'll come up with a way to justify the cost.
"See, we have a team working full time copying the bits by hand."
or else!
... it's about damn time.
Wouldn't it be ironic if the lawsuits brought by the RIAA in an attempt to preserve/enhance strong copyright ended up severely diminishing U.S. copyright law instead?
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
I've always been amazed by the gall they have quoting that number. What other type of copyright infringement can claim 757.6 times the value of the product as damages? When the SPA goes after companies using pirated commercial software they don't look at an old copy of Windows 98 and try claiming $8000 as damages, do they?
Trolling is a art,
The Court has ordered UMG Recordings, Warner Bros. Records, Interscope Records, Motown, and SONY BMG to disclose their expenses-per-download
downl0wned!
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Am I the only one that gets some sort of happiness from the RIAA's obvious abuse of copyright laws? The more and more they are able to stretch them, the more and more obvious it becomes that the whole deal needs an overhaul. At one point lawmakers are gonna put their foot down and make sure this comes to an end, and that it can never happen again, right?...........right?
You can find many other such artists, and free, legal music hosting sites in my article Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
song ........ $0.99 .. $749.01
legal fees
They're using their grammar skills there.
As the saying goes "What's good for the goose is good for the gander". If the RIAA can press for wide ranging discovery that is intrusive for the defendants, they have to be able to do the same to plantiffs when they're after information that is relevant to their defense.
I would hope that a judge wouldn't accept costs more of than 70c per song since that's about how much they get from iTunes (the cost per download shouldn't include Apples cut of the 99c since of course that's Apples income not the Record Companies). I'd run whatever they come up with past an accountant though given the recording industrys penchant for creative accounting.
Is it just me or is there a ridiculous number of exhibits and motions in this Lindor case? I count 239 links on Ray's blog just for this one case. I noticed this link from December 14, 2006--a year ago--in which the plaintiffs appear to be stalling on this very issue. The letter makes reference to a hearing from August of 2006. Has this one issue really been going on that long?
According to the copyright office, damages go from 750$ to 30,000$. Unknown infringement is no less than 200$. Known, willful infringement is no greater than 150,000$. These all are statutory damages.
I guess the next question is to actually ask if these statutory damages are constitutional or not, which is being asked now. Really, what else is there?
They were in a lose-lose situation before they started. Ignore the problem, and the copyright law is useless. Try to enforce your rights, and the legal protections degrade, as you observed.
Fighting the mob is very difficult — but they are trying. At least, a watered-down law may still be a law they may be able to enforce...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Just out of curiosity, has anyone on Slashdot been on the receiving end of an RIAA suit, or possibly a lawyer dealing with a client who has been? Or not even directly involved, but just know someone who's been through this ordeal?
Every time a story like this comes up I read as many comments as I can and think, "Well fuck, if it's this obvious to everyone here that what's happening is out of line and in some cases illegal, why can't that message be communicated more broadly?"
I have an extensive list of information I've been saving from Slashdot just on the off chance I ever get an RIAA letter in the mail (I d/l maybe an album per month, 90% of the time I buy it after listening). If I find myself facing one of these suits, I would immediately turn over to my lawyer everything I've compiled to be sure they're aware of what should be argued and what RIAA claims are total BS.
Is there an existing repository for information like this, or is it time people like us Slashdotters created one?
Name...That...Autocomplete!
Waiting to be ashamed publicly, specially in front of all the filesharers... priceless.
While the Brooklyn bench has its issues, the RIAA, etc have no "home court advantage" in NYC, nor do they impress the Court system on any level. Unlike a smaller burg this will cut no ice in NYC. RIAA, welcome to an unimpressed, hot Bench. Bout time.
What would happen if a judge asked the same from a HD cable vendor?
Audience Au24 High Resolution Loudspeaker Cable: 741$
Just because there's a statue that says X, doesn't mean said statue is legal. It appears that they are claiming it's a 5th and 14th amendment violation, specifically the due process parts. My guess is the argument is based along the lines of the fact that the fines are excessive in relation to the damage. While it is not uncommon for fines to exceed damages, there is generally a somewhat reasonable limit to it. 1000 times, which is what it being claimed (the claim the songs are worth basically $0.70 to the record companies) is well, stupid. Imagine if you took something from a store, maybe you didn't even mean to you just weren't thinking. So they press charges for shoplifting. You then find out that there's a $3000 fine for that $3 pack of gum. A bit excessive maybe? Or how about you are in an accident that's your fault. You cause about $1000 worth of damage to the other guy's car. However you are informed the fine for doing that is $1,000,000.
So their argument is, and I think quite reasonably, that the fines are just unconstitutional. Remember: Laws have to be legal too. Plenty of times in this country idiot legislators pass laws that are in contradiction to higher laws. Just because there is a statue setting damages at a minimum of $750 per song, doesn't make it right.
Maybe the lawyers will find out how much the songs are actually worth to the RIAA and demand they be paid the typical ~30% for settlements. Or will this backfire and show the artists how much they are getting screwed on their end of the record deals? ..sig goes here..
RIAA:"It's 70 cents for the song and $749.30 in cost of PR for restoring faith of our customers/artists/record labels"
Judge:Are you sure?
RIAA: "Ok, it's really 70 cents for the song, $749 for lawyers and $.30 in PR"
Judge: Come on now?
RIAA: "Alright, it's $.03 for the song, $200 for lawyers and $549.97 for your reelection campaign and all the free downloads of "The Gap Band" you can handle? How's that sound judge? Judge? Judge? Is this thing on?"
Quoth the Wikipedia "Punitive Damages:"
"statistical studies by law professors and the Department of Justice have found that punitive damages are only awarded in two percent of civil cases which go to trial, and that the median punitive damage award is between $38,000 and $50,000.[7]
In response to judges and juries which award high punitive damages verdicts, the Supreme Court of the United States has made several decisions which limit awards of punitive damages through the due process of law clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. In a number of cases, the Court has indicated that a 4:1 ratio between punitive and compensatory damages is broad enough to lead to a finding of constitutional impropriety, and that any ratio of 10:1 or higher is almost certainly unconstitutional."
If the song costs $1, and punitive damages of $749 are assessed, it's almost certainly unconstitutional. So why should it be legal statutorily?
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
I am for abolishing copyrights altogether. But I feel even more strongly that people should abide by the law. I have more sympathy for illegal immigrants than I have for people who intentionally violate the copyright law by distributing music and TV programs without the copyright holder's permission.
It is sad when you achieve your political objective through rampant illegality instead of the perfectly suitable political process.
One reason it's important to do so is that the US Supreme Court doesn't render advisory opinions; to have the Court overturn a law that makes something a crime, somebody has to actually break it, be tried and found guilty, appeal and then lose in the appellate courts, then appeal to the Supreme Court.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
So if you find that iRATE doesn't work well for you today, give it a week or two and it should work much better.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
I asked my crystal ball (my magic 8 ball is in the laundry, sorry), and here's what we got.
RIAA lawyer: "You asked for the reason of asking for 750 dollars per song shared, and here's the result:
70 cents per song earned.
An average of 1100 downloaders per song and per source.
That would net about 770, we rounded down in favor of the defendent."
Judge: "I see. And where do you get those numbers? The 1100 downloaders per song and source?"
RIAA lawyer: "Statistics" (slams five pounds of paper onto the judge's desk."
Judge: "I see. But wouldn't after some time a saturation set in? With everyone feeding 1100 downloaders, and each of them again feeding 1100..."
RIAA lawyer (pauses): "Indeed. Well, then let me also file against the defendent for running a pyramid scheme."
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't think the laws have adapated to the fact that people are happy to give away copyrighted material for absolutley nothing.
There are two types of groups breaking copyright now.
The actual pirates, copying material and selling it for their own commercial gain, to the detriment of the owner of the IP, and then you have the kids, mothers, grandmothers, students and anyone else dabbling in copyright infringment for personal use.
As with many drug laws in many countries, they have developed laws to severley punish the dealers and producers trying to use drugs for commercial gain, and have a seperate set of punishments for users, only interested in getting high, not making a profit.
This should be taken into consideration in copyright law as well I think. Someone is not recieving fair legal judgment when they are brought up on civil claims designed to punish commercial copyright pirates, for freely sharing, not for profit.
People don't really learn a lesson when you send them bankrupt for sharing 3 or 4 songs with JoeSixpack up the street, they only end up resentful, and make a lot of loud noise which gives your company a very very bad public image.
Remember Minority Report? The wooden balls?
Those held a single name. Imagine the size of the balls you'd need to record an entire song.
Movie makers; they have the biggest balls in the industry.
Civil disobedience comes into question in serious civil and human rights issues. Music downloads are not among them.
Every law is wrong in somebody's opinion, or the law wouldn't have been needed in the first place.
Ray,
Elsewhere Michael D. Crawford posted the following:
by MichaelCrawford (610140) on Tuesday November 27, @12:52AM (#21488871)
(http://www.geometricvisions.com/ | Last Journal: Monday May 02 2005, @05:35PM)
You don't have to pay the iTunes Music Store to download music legally. Many musicians offer free downloads of their music as a way to promote themselves. I'm one such artist [geometricvisions.com]. You could really help me out if you shared my music over the Internet.
--
If we were to talk about the scientific method, we'd need "unknown artists" (zero initial expected sales) who actively encourage such promotion and then report later linked sales. Does your firm have any suggestions about a kind of standardized document that describes this kind of "license to promote" but would protect him should an aggressive media company were to usurp his music as alleged in the Timbaland/Nelly Furtado situation?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV2fTEeP6GM
Is there precedent for different types of encouraging licenses similar to the software world? (Share only, derivatives allowed, etc.)
So far on my list are Mr. Crawford and Adam Dada who actively promote sharing of their material. But how can we standardize this?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
It would kind of make sense for them to to try get larger sums of money if they knew how many had downloaded the music. Then it's reasonable to think they could demand quite a bit more than 99 cents per song at least. But it's just that I rarely hear them coming forward with such numbers, and I'm not sure if they even know them, or if they just eavesdrop on the file sharer.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
They are not trying to preserve copyright, they are trying to make it into something unAmerican that violates the US Constitution. In other words, their actions have destroyed copyright regardless of success or failure. They have used several techniques to make their exclusive franchise eternal, have redefined the meaning of the franchise from protection against commercial publication to nonsensical "making available" and "unauthorized copy," and worst of all have made a civil mater into a criminal one with unusual punishment. To do this they have trampled free speech, due process, the fourth amendment and have technically sabotaged legitimate competitors. That's not copyright, it's information and market control straight out of the former Soviet Union.
It will be good to get back real copyright law and put it in balance with the way information really flows. The goals of copyright law is encouragement of the public domain and to advance the state of the art. People should not lose their house for sharing a few songs, books, movies and other material with their friends. Businesses that can't compete in freedom don't deserve to exist.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
RIAA: Nonsense! Everybody has a price. Ours is just spectacularly high.
The Supreme Court held in State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co v. Campbell et al. 538 U.S. 408 (2003) that a punitive damage award that is more than 10 times higher than the actual damages is presumably a violation of due process. Thus, it logically follows that statutory damages ($750) that are more than 1,100 times higher than actual damages are an even greater violation of due process for two reasons: First, the ratio is significantly higher, and second, the goal of statutory damages is compensatory rather than punative, so there is less of a reason to make the damages a high number; it should bear a relation to the actual damages. The sole purpose of statutory damages in copyright law is due to the fact that actual damages are often hard if not impossible to prove. But if actual harm can be quantified in any reasonable manner, then a statutory damage award must still bear a reasonable ratio to that amount or else it would violate due process. More than 10 to 1 is improper for punative damages, I'd say more than 2-3 to 1 is improper for statutory damages (since the purpose is not to punish, but merely to compensate the copyright holder). The copyright holder can seek punative damages at trial and if they can prove their case and entitlement thereto, they can get punative damages up to 10 times higher than actual damages. But for congress to mandate a statutory damage amount over 1,100 times higher than the actual harm/loss (per infringement!) simply must be an unconstitutional violation of due process to be consistent with existing Supreme Court precedent. This is particularly true if one argues that a portion of statutory damages include punative damages.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
I've been thinking about different arguments in regards to fair use(specifically: the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole) and the technical nature of how bittorrent works.
Torrents are made up of a bunch of little pieces. Could someone even prove that you actually had a substantial amount of a specific file if you were in a swarm of seeders? Could you claim fair use given the fact that you might only have a piece of a file in question? Just a thought...
All things are subject to interpretation, whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and n
Cost of lost sale - 75 cents
Cost of lost sales from people you share the song to - $749.25
1+1=3
Color me surprised (one of the links in the article point to her site); i wouldn't have guessed her to be on the anti-RIAA side. Learn something every day... does that mean i'm going to have to think about what she says now? .max
Punitive Damages: "are those with the intent to punish the defendant. The hope is that awarding punitive damages will deter similar actions in the future both by the defendant and others similarly situated."
encyclopedia.kids.net.au/page/ne/Negligence
but also are "Damages awarded in addition to actual damages when the defendant acted with recklessness, malice, or deceit."
https://www.legalexplorer.com/AM/Template.cfm
Punitive can be and are usually significantly higher than an infringement's monetary value because they are meant to PUNISH and DETER future infringement.
Even if the actual cost is revealed, the damages will not decrease. If anything, it is an opportunity for them to INCREASE the amount of statutory damages that they can collect.
They are not stupid, they are in more control of what happens than it may seem because they have control of the cases. If they come across someone who they think could possibly beat them or damage their cause, all that they have to do is simply drop the case from court. Conversely, because they are the ones filing the suits, they can hand pick the courts that they want to take their cases to. Thus allowing them to not only collect minuscule and essentially irrelevant monetary damages from the victims of their suits but simultaneously re-write copyright case law to their hearts content!
Some Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/) music providers: Jamendo = http://www.jamendo.com/en/ Search CC = http://search.creativecommons.org/# OpSound = http://opsound.org/ w00tw0t0 Records http://w00tw0t0.net/ and a small internet Radio only CC music http://digilander.libero.it/freemusicstyle/ These are FREE and LEGAL. There is no need to pay anyone and sometimes, depending on the license, you are free to elaborate or even profit. So the estimated cost is "how much you want to donate". The quality is good if compared to the pieces of Britney Spears (for instance) but you won't easily find any boy band. As long as we know they are a marketing product and not real music. I know this is slightly offtopic, but I'll be glad if someone visits those sites and gets inspiration.
that's what contempt of court is for... though i'll be interested in hearing their answer to this
You can get, say 25 years for murder. If you kill 20 people as a MASS murderer, you dont get 500 years possible. Or if you do, it's "20 25 year sencences to be server concurrently". So all that happens is you have to serve 25 years and have a slightly lesser chance of getting out early for good behaviour.
But when it comes to infringing copyright, it's 25x$2,000 for sharing one song 25 times.
Do you get sentenced per bullet?
No.
were supposed to be for the illegal pressing plants, where you don't know how much money they've made because the copies are gone. so you figure out something that will remove all profit from the (genuine) piracy without having to prove your case.
In cases of genuine piracy, the pirate has managed to gain sales that should have gone to the copyright holder, and the fines are a way to get that money to the proper person. In this case, statutory damages are a way to estimate how much money should be passed on. A real figure could be found by finding the accounts and taking all that money.
In the case of non-profit sharing, all you've lost is the opportunity cost. There is no money that should have gone to the proper person because no money has changed hands. In this case, statutory damages are punishment. There's no way to find a real figure that isn's zero.
(Yikes, it's scary to find myself offering an argument for the RIAA's side of something. I'll take a long shower after posting this, but anyway...)
IANAL, but I can't think the courts would refuse to admit a methodologically sound series of independent experiments into evidence, whereby the experimenter seeds a number of files (of varying popularity) with unique, recognizable bitprints, then measures and documents their distribution. The RIAA probably holds the position that a filesharer is responsible not only for the direct downloads he generates, but for subsequent distribution of the file as well. 10 * 10 * 10 gets you over 750 pretty fast.
Admitting the study into evidence might make them have to adjust the damage amounts to consider each song's popularity, but it could conceivably justify an average of 750 copies in circulation * $0.99, over time.
Pi Ran Out
suddenoutbreakofcommonsense :D
However, in this case its just being used as a punitive and financial fishing trip. Instead of saying they definitively lost X$, they just opt for the far alternatively mandated mininum.
When they thought this law out, what were thinking was being infringed upon to warrant a minimum of 750 and a max of 30k? 750$ is in the range for electronics. Have you ever seen a knock off television? Someone selling a pirated washer/dryer? 30k? Someone manage to dupe a BMW?
But thats all for you Americans to decide, with your overly litigious society. I'll stick with good ol' Canada, where its still illegal to suborne treason against Queen.
DRM=Digital Restrictions Management
.wav and replaced the two that wouldn't play with songs sampled from my cassette copy. As I have a very good used cassette deck I paid $50 for (that originally sold for $600), there is little audible difference between the digitally mangled CD and the cassette's sound, whether played on my home JBL three ways (12 inch woofers) or the six speaker car stereo.
I think of it as "dumb record mangling." My copy of the CD of Led Zeppelin's first album (that I bought at Recycled Records) has two songs that won't play, despite the fact that there are no visible scratches or other defects.
So I ripped all the songs to
In fact, the DRM on that CD and listening to my workaround to its designed defects is what convinced me to stop replacing my tapes and LPs with CDs, and to write the above linked article.
I'd already got a CD copy of their Presence album and it lacked presence. So I tried sampling the LP and guess what? My burned CD of the LP sounds better than the factory CD, which obviously suffers from bad remastering.
The record companies are obviously run by idiots who think their customers are all fools. Sadly, the idiots may be right.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
This is an interesting ruling to me because I guess the claim is that the RIAA companies are providing the music to some of the services at around seventy cents per download "wholesale", but we all know that their actual cost is much lower. Their cost was incurred by the production of the music and it's marketing, but the cost of downloading the music is born by the folks at each end of the wire, i.e. the person who shared the file and the person who downloaded it. The existence of the music on a shared drive doesn't even prove that a cost of downloading was incurred. So the rulings on this part of the trial are interesting in terms of not just this lawsuit but others which may follow.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
... this might be only a few steps away from outright selling copyrighted songs. In a courtroom setting, of course.
What's the value of information that you don't know?
Here's some more free music from some friends of mine (I think the links are still good, the band broke up iinm). here are some more, they're still togather and I doubt you've heard anything like them. Their first CD, All That Lies Between is IMO their best.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Every download is a lost sale.
We have no other choice than to file these suits.
Only expedited, ex parte discovery will do.
The entire decline in the record industry sales is due to file sharing.
We're entitled to statutory damages of $150,000 per song to recoup our losses.
The RIAA might be perceived in a bit better if they weren't spouting such obvious lies every day.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Actually, they do. They've managed to find an especially friendly judge and magistrate judge, and are (so far) successfully managing to get all these cases heard by him by claiming that all these cases deal with related or similar issues. That's like saying that all bank robberies that involve a gun and a car should go to the same judge since he understands cars and guns best, rather than the random assignment of cases to judges that normally occurs. This is bad because a judge is unlikely to reverse himself on precedent, so once he decides in favor of the RIAA in one case, he is more prone to do so in all other boilerplate cases.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
About freakin' time that some judge pulled his/her head out of their butt and asked validation of the cost. Can't we just nuke RIAA headquarters?
Veritas patesco per quaestio questio. Truth is revealed through questions.
It's somewhat redundant to point out what greedy bastards the record companies are. But when some of their techniques get exposed, well, that puts them at risk. Traditional record and CD sales resulted in a royalty check to artists based on the number of units sold, minus per-unit costs all sorts of things: manufacturing costs, packaging costs, shipping costs, breakage, returns and so forth. When record companies started colluding with iTunes etc. to get their music sold electronically, what do you think the royalty invoices looked like? Pretty much the same: "We sold this many units, and now that you've paid of the unbelievably high fees we charged you to record it in the first place, you get ten cents per unit, minus maufacturing, packaging, shipping, breakage and returns."
Breakage? I kid you not.
In reality the record companies have no per-unit costs. Those are eaten by iTunes or whoever. Their total distribution cost for a song is the salary of one bored intern dragging and dropping and clicking "send." That's their total cost per song. Their total cost per download rapidly approaches zero.
So now the RIAA members are being forced to disclose, in open court, how much it really costs them to do business online. That's going to play merry hell with their ability to lie to artists about how expensive it is to act as their agents.
This is not my sandwich.
And pouring over several of these back up when the initial question was raised about these "costs", and as you read forward from then on, you begin to see a pattern emerge. One of a multitude of attorneys beginning to feed and feast one one another. Some of the language used in these documents speaks volumes of the profanity and cursing bantering on in several 5th avenue offices and apartments.
All content in this message is copyright (c) 2008. All rights reserved. RIAA is prohibited here.
I know it's a harder road, but I hope you fought back?
I'm sure that NYCL could give you a good referral if you haven't already got a lawyer.
SoundExchange is not yet law in Canada, and along with myself and RantRadio, Michael Crawford could probably avoid them for the time being.
In the long term, though you're probably right.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
If you are on a DSL line with 300Kb/s upload rate. And you leave your computer on 24hrs a day, and people download from you at 100% usage, they are only going to get about 15 songs downloaded / day (based on 3.5MB file size), or about 450 songs/month. Assuming a more reasonable 10% utilization/day that's 10songs per month. So a single file sharer on DSL can cost the RIAA about $25/month in lost revenues, assuming the RIAA get 50% of that 0.99/song.
The RIAA should have to prove that (a) you are the file sharer, and (b) the amount of time you are sharing, i.e. a month, a year, etc. Clearly the RIAA is using the courts to scare people, frankly I find it appalling the absurd amount of money they ask for "settlement". The punishment would be much less severe to just steal a few cds from the record store (I do not advocate doing this!)
Artist 0.30
RIAA 100.00
Lawyers 649.70
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
the US gov has blatantly refused to comply with North American Free Trade Agreement rulings telling them to stop putting tariffs and subsidies on things, so yeah, I think you're right.
And who on earth would impose sanctions on the usa? No one is dumb enough to impede themselves in a market that big and consumer-oriented.
Oh, please. Welcome to the United States of America, ye olde plutocracy. Why do you think celebrities can get away with just about anything? Why have Microsoft, Apple (yes, Apple), and the RIAA, et al., gotten away with the horrendous legal practices that they have? They've been doing it for years, and they know how to manipulate. What makes you think that they'll be stopped now? They won't be stopped until they personally piss off the legal system; until then, regretably, they're here for good.
<sig> </sig>
Of course, "sharing" requires a sacrifice. When you share your ball on the playground, you are giving that ball (and your time/experience with that ball) up so that someone else can have it. When you share a piece of a donut, you are giving away a part of the donut and you will never get it back, because you gave it to someone else to enjoy. "Sharing is caring" because you care to sacrifice something you have for someone else's benefit.
You are not "sharing" downloaded music, you are keeping it for yourself as well as distributing it to X number of people. That is called "having your cake and eating it too...and giving that same cake to X number of people". Whoever calls this sharing is grossly misinformed.
When you copy a track and give it to other people without the right or permission to do so, you are stealing, plain and simple. 40 million copies of the latest Justin Timberlake song did not suddenly appear out of nowhere, and certainly the people who have permission to sell his song did not receive 40 million payments. Meaning that song was stolen from them.
Of course, if you are actually SHARING music, like giving someone your CD or tape or LP or whatever so they can listen to it at your expense (time, effort, etc)
All things being equal (ie, not counting the horrible state the *AA is in, the legal changes needed, etc), most people here are committing illegal (more importantly: wrong) acts, and no matter how you try to spin it, you should have to pay for it.
Does anyone else feel like the diversity and quality of music coming out the last few years has taken a nosedive. I think that if the music industry put as much effort into developing new music as it has into the RIAA lawsuits, DRM & root kits that they (& the consumer) would be in much better shape.
With this 'cost' door opened, the whole system may implode in a kind of Pandora's Box syndrome (which may not be such a bad thing as it will open the door of opportunity for someone else to come up with a better way of 'doing music'.).
Overall, I think the situation has been badly handled and let the chips fall as they may...