if an aggregator becomes the destination of choice for people instead of the source then the aggregator must be offering something or offering it in some way that the people want and the source does not. If a page is nothing but a set of links then you'll cut out the middle-man and go directly to the source. This is true of even google: you don't google/. , you come here directly. And/. offers a reason for people to keep coming back here instead of El Reg, ZDNet or any of the other popular sites that get linked from here: the comments/discussion. Most articles on the front page still get hundreds of comments and there is generally pretty good discussion.
So what should a company like News Corp do? Instead of cutting itself off from the public (it's readership) give them a reason to go directly to the site instead of the aggregator. The content alone is not sufficient reason: I can get "the news" from dozens of sources (which is another problem for another post), what a successful company does (all of them, not just news) is give people a Reason To Buy.
This is pretty basic Business-101, and that it's uncommon wisdom for a billionaire businessman shows how far from competition we've fallen.
just a quick nit-pick before we start, you are not supposed to be able to patent an idea: you are only supposed to be able to patent the implementation. Of course, the system is broken and they're happily patenting ideas, precluding anyone from implementing the same idea differently.
Prior to that, clearly nobody had implemented it.. so the idea couldn't have been that obvious.
So at the risk of approaching reductio ad absurdum, you're suggesting that because the Mayans didn't invent the drive-thru it's non-obvious?
They had no need for the drive-thru, nor all the necessary bits in between (cars for example) to make a drive-thru even a consideration.
All things are built on those that came before, and it's quite disingenuous to assert that if it's not been done before it's by definition non-obvious.
Obvious ideas have lots of simultaneous prior art because, well, they're obvious..
The telephone and radio are two great examples where (at least) two people "invented" the same thing at the same time. Are/were these obvious by your definition? And if not, why should only one person get the patent when clearly multiple people worked on it and solved the problems, often in the exact same way simultaneously and independently?
The patent system is badly broken. It's used chiefly to exclude new competition (incumbents cross-license, MAD-style) or by patent trolls extracting a rent from the economy without contributing anything back.
From all the economics I've read on the subject, patents are at best economically break-even but realistically they are a net cost/loss and should be abolished. Unfortunately you can buy a lot of laws with monopoly rents and for some reason we think that Big Companies are a desirable goal, so I don't see patents going away any time soon. The best we can hope for is some much needed reform. One such much needed element is the "independent invention" defense. That would take the teeth out of a lot of these patents and allow real competition to flourish.
two possible answers:
It's not unprofitable for Google since they have ad revenue and InterTubes/pipes that YouTube did not. So while YouTube wasn't making money, some believe that YouTube is a money-maker for Google.
That example would be more like Apple buying Lala and shutting down iTunes.
Because anyone actually thought that Apple was going to keep running two competing music stores?
Up here in the Great White North there are two major electronics retail outlets: Best Buy and Futureshop. Guess who owns Futureshop?
The Forzani Group has half a dozen sporting retail brands including SportChek and SportMart which compete directly with each other, as well as running Intersport and other franchises.
Competing with yourself is a great way to give consumers the illusion of choice and power while still running the market. When one of your retail brands ticks off a customer, they just go next door and still gives you their money.
Whoever wants to.
Let's face it - - the human race is being dragged into the future by a very small percentage of the people. And despite what the Monopolists/Corporate-Overlords want everyone to believe, to create and/or express ourselves creatively is what is means to be human. People will create, tinker, entertain and generally Do Stuff (tm) without the need for million dollar paychecks.
When we arrive at the point when all our needs are met we won't require that everyone works by definition, and those that really matter can't help but to create; it bubbles out of them.
Of course, this isn't desirable since the average person has no clue what the government ought to be doing, so a republic is still the better option.
Most people act in their own self interest.
Politicians self-interest is not the same as the public's interest. There may be coincidental overlap, but they are not the same.
Politicians have proven themselves clueless on many issues that they get to vote on.
Your statement seems to rely on (what I believe to be a false) premise that those that we elect are our betters.
Based on this, I see no reason to agree with your assertion that a representative democracy is better than a direct one. I will agree that in the past, a direct democracy was not feasible, hence a representative one was better than the alternatives.
At best that's true if you believe that democracy is working - I no longer believe this. There's little real accountability - we periodically elect dictators who are largely and often financed by corporate agendas. The political bribe (re-branded as "campaign contribution" to legalise them) is more powerful than the vote.
We're allowed to choose between a couple of bad choices.
We're ordering our laws like Chinese food combos: no substitutions, pick a slate of views and order..errr, vote.
We have laws foisted upon us by these politicians with little regard for what the people want.
I've been a growing fan of direct democracy. At least if the people really had a say on issues then I could agree that we got what we asked for. Right now, I'm not convinced we're getting anywhere near what we want.
Tell me, Mr. Anderson, what good is a phone call when you are unable to speak?
It is no more the government's job to enforce good business models than it is to prop up failed ones.
You state this as though the existence of copyright is not the government propping up a business model.
The effects of this right would be destabilising the current system without proposing anything to replace it.
I thought you just said the government had no place in business models. Based on what you've stated you should be happy that no alternate has been proposed. That's a nice no-win situation you've established there.
makes you seem like you have absolutely no clue about economics
Your entire post presupposes that copyright is necessary, and the economics doesn't seem to support that, so I take issue with your undeserved attack on the level of economic understanding of others.
There's the problem right there: In a free society it's supposed to be a stewardship, not a dictatorship.
I highly doubt most citizens of a free country want their government to restrict where they can go online, much less censor via a secret list.
...didn't know that was an option. They all look like licensing or rental deals to me. Actual ownership seems to be something that won't be conferred to the serfs.
You may not like paying for your news, in the end someone has to pay for it...
Historically all we (consumers) paid for was the paper, ink and delivery. The content was paid for by advertising revenue - this hasn't changed: we pay the ISP for the delivery and it's electric ink and paper.
There is no reason why we can't continue to get all our news in this model. Indefinitely.
The current business model is not maintainable, everyone is losing. Most of all the readers, who are more and more getting the exact same news from any paper
This is the important bit. It made sense to have a YourTown Gazette in the paper world that carried all the world's news. It made no sense in the paper era to have only a few papers printed and shipped all over. Yet even in the paper era AP and Reuters sprang up to fill the need that YourTown Gazette can't have a reporter in every location on earth. And the internet amplifies this. There are simply too many redundant entities trying to deliver the same information and each paying a staff to do this. It is, as you have stated, not sustainable.
For international news there needs to be only a few agencies that report the same thing. These can easily be sustained by ad revenues: Google is proof of this. Local news will take a hit; I don't see some communities having the resources or draw to have "professional" news reporting, and maybe that's a good thing. Community driven news will spring up: blogs etc to cover the local issues and those that are interested in the local news will read and contribute. Think Open Source News. It's the communities, discussions and interactions that matter as much as the events.
My prediction is that like all paywalls before, this one will fail to generate any meaningful revenue, but will hopefully begin to shake-out the industry into something sustainable.
I don't see the point in letting them receive tax deductions for their contributions. They made these contributions because it was in their best interest to do so regardless of the tax status.... government wealth distribution is not needed in a system that already does so inherently.
The basis for copyright is that the public wishes to increase the amount of work in the public domain. Copyright is a deal between creators and public whereby the public believes that there will be more works generated (and end up public domain) by giving a temporary monopoly to creators. The key in the deal, however, is not to reward the creator, but to generate works for the public domain.*
I would suggest, therefore, that giving (tax) incentives for open source software is in line with this policy. People who contribute to open source are giving up their monopoly rights and their work is available immediately for remixing into new works**. Since time is money I would suggest that anyone who is willing to give up their monopoly period should be rewarded.
This isn't a unique concept: Corporations get all kinds of special and additional tax deductions for various activities such as R&D. We do this with the same line of reasoning: we want more R&D, so we provide an incentive so we can reap the rewards.
Lastly, it should be pointed out that the level of incentive (how rich is this program) should be inversely proportional to the duration of copyright. In other words if copyright lasts longer I've given up more by immediately making it available for remixing and should therefore get a greater incentive. If copyright is short than I haven't given up much and should require less incentive.
* perpetual copyright extension has killed this, but that is another topic.
** Yes, it's not public domain, but they no longer have a monopoly on the distribution of the work.
Given that 800 new books are published *every day*...
...you still have nothing to substantiate the claim that copyright entices people to produce. I stipulate with equal authority that the fact that there are only 800 new books and not 1000 new books makes it fair to say that copyright does not work.
The "there is not such thing as imaginary property" crowd haven't come anywhere near proving that a system without copyright would generate anywhere near this amount of new content
It is obviously difficult to prove what a system without copyright would produce as there are few areas where some form of intellectual monopoly has not been implemented by the incumbents. The fashion industry is one example where we can see that a complete lack of ability to prohibit others from copying you causes significant innovation and creativity. That the big fashion producers are looking for protection now is quite telling: It has nothing to do with giving incentives to create, but everything to do with monopoly profits.
It is of course not for us (who believe the system causes more harm than good) to prove that it works: the onus is on you to prove that it works as you are in favor of restricting everyone's physical property rights for imaginary ones.
One simple question to ask is for you to provide a single Monopoly that has given us more choice, better products and lower prices than competition? Former monopolies like the TelCo's of course provided the best, most varied and least expensive handsets when they had a lock on providing these handsets, right?
isn't just rehashes and remixes of existing copyrighted material
...and this is just foolishly naive. All works are built on those that came before. No author, no musician, no artist, no creator has generated their works in a vacuum. Authors read, musicians listen to music. All work is derivative. The majority (if not all) plots in modern books can be found in Shakespeare. Musical styles can be traced quite easily going back decades for modern music and for many melodies or themes going back centuries. That Disney "stole" Steamboat Willy from the public domain and now refuses to let Willy (aka: Mickey) back into the public domain demonstrates the true motives. Had we had the current copyright law in the 1800s, Dracula would not be in the public domain and we wouldn't have any of the thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of vampire movies, books, TV shows, music, paintings, jewelry etc. They would all be derivative works and most likely never have been created. Intellectual monopolies (both patent and copyright) cause holes in innovation and creativity that remain untapped: few people are going to create in a space where someone else can (at any time later) tell you that they own your creation as well.
Obviously having a way to reward creators is a good thing: we all need to eat. But there is a pile of negatives that come along with copyright and I can't agree that it is in any way obvious that granting a monopoly is ever good economic policy.
Progress is made at the speed of information. It is ironic that when information moved by foot or boat we had less artificial restrictions than now when information can move around the globe at the speed of the internet.
From TFA: Apple iPhone requires application signing and it issues and revokes the certificates making it a powerful security feature.
This "feature" is a prime reason I didn't buy an iPhone. I guess as a Security Guy he has to be willing to give up all his freedoms in his quest for security...
Stuff is cheap there because landlines/telecom are often heavily subsidized by governments...
AFAIK all landlines/telcom the world over are heavily subsidized by governments including (AFAIK) the USofA --even if only in startup capital and/or right-of-ways. The only remaining question is whether you or a CEO is keeping/reaping the benefits of said subsidy?
and have 50% of my paycheck taken away
Please tell me of this land where there is a 50% tax rate where 100% (hell, a measurable/relevant percentage!) of said tax goes to subsidizing Internet/telephony? I suspect that while you have lived in lands where 50% tax is common (I do) a barely measurable percentage of that pays for Internet. I suggest that most taxes in such countries goes to health care and defense (aka: military).
so, again, the only remaining question is whether you or a CEO is keeping/reaping the benefits of said subsidy? Stop drinking the KoolAid.
You're AC, so you probably won't see this, but you're dead wrong. The fashion industry has absolutely no ability to copyright their designs. I can take a pair of Ralph Lauren jeans, take them apart and copy them exactly with other material and sell them without any worry of getting sued.
What I can't do is put the RL logo on anything, but that's trademark and has nothing to do with the original question or answer.
Describe a credible system in which anyone can copy anything without restriction but there is still sufficient incentive for people to produce and share high quality work in the first place, and I'm sure the sceptics like me will be interested in what you have to say.
Don't worry that you can't see a business model without copyright: the so-called Captains of Industry can't see one either. The easy answer to your question of how people could be expected to make a living without worrying about copyright is found by reading a blog called TechDirt. There are plenty of examples there, and it's a good starting point if you're interested in this topic.
Mandatory reading for the topic of copyright and patent protections is a 10-chapter book found at Against Monopoly.
I have not been keeping it updated, but I occasionally add stuff to my journal as well.
Well, false rumors are called "libel" or "slander", and in the USA you are able to sue the perpetrators of these acts.
GP says shouldn't, but equally important these days is the greater realization that it's "can't": See Streisand Effect
And this is a key point: The internet is a giant copying and storage machine. Where the old systems may have made sense due to the difficulty and expense of publishing and disseminating information, the internet has in fact cleared the way for knowledge to be fairly universal. Where we had technological and financial barriers to which copyright may have been a viable solution we now only have an artificial barrier holding progress back.
Regardless, ideas need to be protected for a limited time just because saying that ideas can't be owned places manual labor on a higher level than thinking.
I'm not sure I understand your assertion.
Are you suggesting that without copyright we won't have any ideas? That's a non-starter that ends the conversation.
Are you suggesting that without copyright we will have less ideas? There I'll challenge you for proof of your assertion.
Of course, maybe I've really not understood what conclusion you were working towards.
When the music industry returns to a realistic business model
The first problem is the terminology: "the music industry" does not have a problem with piracy. The "music recording and publishing industry" has a problem with piracy. Note that it's the Recording Industry Association of America that is talking. The recording industry keeps saying that the "music industry" is in trouble, but it turns out it's just the recording industry that's in trouble: the music industry revenue is up.
So if you're interested in helping to solve all this, the first thing is to take back the language: the music industry is not only alive and well - it's growing. People are spending more on music then ever before, it's just the recording industry that needs to adapt. (imho, they can adapt by following in the footsteps of the dinosaur and extinct already...)
Slashdot Mirror
if an aggregator becomes the destination of choice for people instead of the source then the aggregator must be offering something or offering it in some way that the people want and the source does not. If a page is nothing but a set of links then you'll cut out the middle-man and go directly to the source. This is true of even google: you don't google /. , you come here directly. And /. offers a reason for people to keep coming back here instead of El Reg, ZDNet or any of the other popular sites that get linked from here: the comments/discussion. Most articles on the front page still get hundreds of comments and there is generally pretty good discussion.
So what should a company like News Corp do? Instead of cutting itself off from the public (it's readership) give them a reason to go directly to the site instead of the aggregator. The content alone is not sufficient reason: I can get "the news" from dozens of sources (which is another problem for another post), what a successful company does (all of them, not just news) is give people a Reason To Buy.
This is pretty basic Business-101, and that it's uncommon wisdom for a billionaire businessman shows how far from competition we've fallen.
just a quick nit-pick before we start, you are not supposed to be able to patent an idea: you are only supposed to be able to patent the implementation. Of course, the system is broken and they're happily patenting ideas, precluding anyone from implementing the same idea differently.
So at the risk of approaching reductio ad absurdum, you're suggesting that because the Mayans didn't invent the drive-thru it's non-obvious?
They had no need for the drive-thru, nor all the necessary bits in between (cars for example) to make a drive-thru even a consideration.
All things are built on those that came before, and it's quite disingenuous to assert that if it's not been done before it's by definition non-obvious.
The telephone and radio are two great examples where (at least) two people "invented" the same thing at the same time. Are/were these obvious by your definition? And if not, why should only one person get the patent when clearly multiple people worked on it and solved the problems, often in the exact same way simultaneously and independently?
The patent system is badly broken. It's used chiefly to exclude new competition (incumbents cross-license, MAD-style) or by patent trolls extracting a rent from the economy without contributing anything back.
From all the economics I've read on the subject, patents are at best economically break-even but realistically they are a net cost/loss and should be abolished. Unfortunately you can buy a lot of laws with monopoly rents and for some reason we think that Big Companies are a desirable goal, so I don't see patents going away any time soon. The best we can hope for is some much needed reform. One such much needed element is the "independent invention" defense. That would take the teeth out of a lot of these patents and allow real competition to flourish.
two possible answers:
It's not unprofitable for Google since they have ad revenue and InterTubes/pipes that YouTube did not. So while YouTube wasn't making money, some believe that YouTube is a money-maker for Google.
That example would be more like Apple buying Lala and shutting down iTunes.
Up here in the Great White North there are two major electronics retail outlets: Best Buy and Futureshop. Guess who owns Futureshop?
The Forzani Group has half a dozen sporting retail brands including SportChek and SportMart which compete directly with each other, as well as running Intersport and other franchises.
Competing with yourself is a great way to give consumers the illusion of choice and power while still running the market. When one of your retail brands ticks off a customer, they just go next door and still gives you their money.
Please define perfect and flourish.
Then specify what this business model is, and how it flourishes without competition.
I'm either missing something, or I'm going to disagree with your definition of perfect and/or flourish.
Whoever wants to.
Let's face it - - the human race is being dragged into the future by a very small percentage of the people. And despite what the Monopolists/Corporate-Overlords want everyone to believe, to create and/or express ourselves creatively is what is means to be human. People will create, tinker, entertain and generally Do Stuff (tm) without the need for million dollar paychecks.
When we arrive at the point when all our needs are met we won't require that everyone works by definition, and those that really matter can't help but to create; it bubbles out of them.
Most people act in their own self interest.
Politicians self-interest is not the same as the public's interest. There may be coincidental overlap, but they are not the same.
Politicians have proven themselves clueless on many issues that they get to vote on.
Your statement seems to rely on (what I believe to be a false) premise that those that we elect are our betters.
Based on this, I see no reason to agree with your assertion that a representative democracy is better than a direct one. I will agree that in the past, a direct democracy was not feasible, hence a representative one was better than the alternatives.
At best that's true if you believe that democracy is working - I no longer believe this. There's little real accountability - we periodically elect dictators who are largely and often financed by corporate agendas. The political bribe (re-branded as "campaign contribution" to legalise them) is more powerful than the vote.
We're allowed to choose between a couple of bad choices.
We're ordering our laws like Chinese food combos: no substitutions, pick a slate of views and order..errr, vote.
We have laws foisted upon us by these politicians with little regard for what the people want.
I've been a growing fan of direct democracy. At least if the people really had a say on issues then I could agree that we got what we asked for. Right now, I'm not convinced we're getting anywhere near what we want.
Tell me, Mr. Anderson, what good is a phone call when you are unable to speak?
You state this as though the existence of copyright is not the government propping up a business model.
I thought you just said the government had no place in business models. Based on what you've stated you should be happy that no alternate has been proposed. That's a nice no-win situation you've established there.
Your entire post presupposes that copyright is necessary, and the economics doesn't seem to support that, so I take issue with your undeserved attack on the level of economic understanding of others.
26.3 x 2 = 55.8 ...nothing's going to fly with that kind of math.
There's the problem right there: In a free society it's supposed to be a stewardship, not a dictatorship.
I highly doubt most citizens of a free country want their government to restrict where they can go online, much less censor via a secret list.
Historically all we (consumers) paid for was the paper, ink and delivery. The content was paid for by advertising revenue - this hasn't changed: we pay the ISP for the delivery and it's electric ink and paper.
There is no reason why we can't continue to get all our news in this model. Indefinitely.
This is the important bit. It made sense to have a YourTown Gazette in the paper world that carried all the world's news. It made no sense in the paper era to have only a few papers printed and shipped all over. Yet even in the paper era AP and Reuters sprang up to fill the need that YourTown Gazette can't have a reporter in every location on earth. And the internet amplifies this. There are simply too many redundant entities trying to deliver the same information and each paying a staff to do this. It is, as you have stated, not sustainable.
For international news there needs to be only a few agencies that report the same thing. These can easily be sustained by ad revenues: Google is proof of this. Local news will take a hit; I don't see some communities having the resources or draw to have "professional" news reporting, and maybe that's a good thing. Community driven news will spring up: blogs etc to cover the local issues and those that are interested in the local news will read and contribute. Think Open Source News. It's the communities, discussions and interactions that matter as much as the events.
My prediction is that like all paywalls before, this one will fail to generate any meaningful revenue, but will hopefully begin to shake-out the industry into something sustainable.
The basis for copyright is that the public wishes to increase the amount of work in the public domain. Copyright is a deal between creators and public whereby the public believes that there will be more works generated (and end up public domain) by giving a temporary monopoly to creators. The key in the deal, however, is not to reward the creator, but to generate works for the public domain.*
I would suggest, therefore, that giving (tax) incentives for open source software is in line with this policy. People who contribute to open source are giving up their monopoly rights and their work is available immediately for remixing into new works**. Since time is money I would suggest that anyone who is willing to give up their monopoly period should be rewarded.
This isn't a unique concept: Corporations get all kinds of special and additional tax deductions for various activities such as R&D. We do this with the same line of reasoning: we want more R&D, so we provide an incentive so we can reap the rewards.
Lastly, it should be pointed out that the level of incentive (how rich is this program) should be inversely proportional to the duration of copyright. In other words if copyright lasts longer I've given up more by immediately making it available for remixing and should therefore get a greater incentive. If copyright is short than I haven't given up much and should require less incentive.
* perpetual copyright extension has killed this, but that is another topic.
** Yes, it's not public domain, but they no longer have a monopoly on the distribution of the work.
...you still have nothing to substantiate the claim that copyright entices people to produce. I stipulate with equal authority that the fact that there are only 800 new books and not 1000 new books makes it fair to say that copyright does not work.
It is obviously difficult to prove what a system without copyright would produce as there are few areas where some form of intellectual monopoly has not been implemented by the incumbents. The fashion industry is one example where we can see that a complete lack of ability to prohibit others from copying you causes significant innovation and creativity. That the big fashion producers are looking for protection now is quite telling: It has nothing to do with giving incentives to create, but everything to do with monopoly profits.
It is of course not for us (who believe the system causes more harm than good) to prove that it works: the onus is on you to prove that it works as you are in favor of restricting everyone's physical property rights for imaginary ones.
One simple question to ask is for you to provide a single Monopoly that has given us more choice, better products and lower prices than competition? Former monopolies like the TelCo's of course provided the best, most varied and least expensive handsets when they had a lock on providing these handsets, right?
Obviously having a way to reward creators is a good thing: we all need to eat. But there is a pile of negatives that come along with copyright and I can't agree that it is in any way obvious that granting a monopoly is ever good economic policy.
Progress is made at the speed of information. It is ironic that when information moved by foot or boat we had less artificial restrictions than now when information can move around the globe at the speed of the internet.
Turns out mcgrew's daughter is an excellent speller.
citation needed.
This "feature" is a prime reason I didn't buy an iPhone. I guess as a Security Guy he has to be willing to give up all his freedoms in his quest for security...
AFAIK all landlines/telcom the world over are heavily subsidized by governments including (AFAIK) the USofA --even if only in startup capital and/or right-of-ways. The only remaining question is whether you or a CEO is keeping/reaping the benefits of said subsidy?
Please tell me of this land where there is a 50% tax rate where 100% (hell, a measurable/relevant percentage!) of said tax goes to subsidizing Internet/telephony? I suspect that while you have lived in lands where 50% tax is common (I do) a barely measurable percentage of that pays for Internet. I suggest that most taxes in such countries goes to health care and defense (aka: military).
so, again, the only remaining question is whether you or a CEO is keeping/reaping the benefits of said subsidy? Stop drinking the KoolAid.
You're AC, so you probably won't see this, but you're dead wrong. The fashion industry has absolutely no ability to copyright their designs. I can take a pair of Ralph Lauren jeans, take them apart and copy them exactly with other material and sell them without any worry of getting sued.
What I can't do is put the RL logo on anything, but that's trademark and has nothing to do with the original question or answer.
The Fashion Industry.
Don't worry that you can't see a business model without copyright: the so-called Captains of Industry can't see one either. The easy answer to your question of how people could be expected to make a living without worrying about copyright is found by reading a blog called TechDirt. There are plenty of examples there, and it's a good starting point if you're interested in this topic.
Mandatory reading for the topic of copyright and patent protections is a 10-chapter book found at Against Monopoly.
I have not been keeping it updated, but I occasionally add stuff to my journal as well.
GP says shouldn't, but equally important these days is the greater realization that it's "can't": See Streisand Effect
And this is a key point: The internet is a giant copying and storage machine. Where the old systems may have made sense due to the difficulty and expense of publishing and disseminating information, the internet has in fact cleared the way for knowledge to be fairly universal. Where we had technological and financial barriers to which copyright may have been a viable solution we now only have an artificial barrier holding progress back.
I'm not sure I understand your assertion.
Are you suggesting that without copyright we won't have any ideas? That's a non-starter that ends the conversation.
Are you suggesting that without copyright we will have less ideas? There I'll challenge you for proof of your assertion.
Of course, maybe I've really not understood what conclusion you were working towards.
count me as one. ... others here care to add their names?
The first problem is the terminology: "the music industry" does not have a problem with piracy. The "music recording and publishing industry" has a problem with piracy. Note that it's the Recording Industry Association of America that is talking. The recording industry keeps saying that the "music industry" is in trouble, but it turns out it's just the recording industry that's in trouble: the music industry revenue is up.
So if you're interested in helping to solve all this, the first thing is to take back the language: the music industry is not only alive and well - it's growing. People are spending more on music then ever before, it's just the recording industry that needs to adapt. (imho, they can adapt by following in the footsteps of the dinosaur and extinct already...)