Here’s some news for you – If, as an artist, you can assemble and entertain an audience then the money will keep rolling in. Trent Reznor earned a cool million sales in a year of a record he already gave away for free (earning, i believe, roughly 4 million dollars net) in addition to raking in cash from selling autographed copies and deluxe editions.

If you have a fan base big enough or enthusiastic enough you make money. If you can’t assemble that sort of fan base you either have a serious marketing problem, or your music is, at best, nothing to write home about which is why people don’t come to your gigs after hearing it.

Meaning in the end the only people who are able to use the internet effortlessly and efficiently will be the ones running on a darknet. Fine with me. Not so fine for John Doe who has little to no clue how basic IT works, nor any incentive to learn beyond wanting to be able to surf facebook and porn in peace.

That aside we’ve had to learn that even the existence of murder doesn’t justify removing basic rights of privacy. If, as you say, the existence of filesharing will “compel” abolishing basic civil rights on the internet then the backlash will be huge once John Doe realizes he can’t mail his girlfriend unsurveilled without finding a friendly pirate and learning how to use encryption and anonymization..

…Which is why Trent Reznor sold one million copies of an album he already gave away for free. Which is why Shakira and Lady Gaga don’t give a rat’s ass about filesharing. Which is why Mick Jagger laughed in the face of the interviewer who asked him if he wasn’t afraid of his works being torrented.

If you have to spout nonsense at least make it factual. Any artist with a solid fan base finds money falling from the sky on him since fans, by and large, are always willing to pay good money for what they collect.

You keep assuming filesharers are unemployed brats sitting in their mom’s basement. Well, I hate to differ, but in my experience “pirates” spend ten times as much as nonpirates on their media simply because they are enthusiasts – if they weren’t they wouldn’t bother downloading in the first place. And they can usually afford to do so as they have good salaries.

In fact, it’s far more likely for an unemployed brat to go out and purchase the media he likes (or have daddy buy it) than it is to convince a hard-working exec to spend his precious time going to the store or hassling with online purchasing for media of a lower quality than he’d get on TPB (sanitized and free of commercials and locked legal warnings) in five minutes flat.

I bought online once. It took me three days to remove the last traces of the DRM which promptly screwed my system over. When the DRM gives you more hassle than what “real” malware does it’s time to find a different distributor.

Same these days. When someone i know calls me over to fix their comp and i find overly aggressive/buggy DRM being the root cause i now recommend a fresh OS install and getting the stuff sanitized from TPB instead. At least an antivirus/antimalware solution will usually work on what you can get from a torrented file.

I repeat what I’ve said before. When you can show me where I can purchase what I want, when I want it, and get it in a higher/similar quality than what the “free” alternatives offer….THEN you’ll see me using that solution.

Today it’s standard practice for many to actually purchase a game legitimately but they end up installing the cracked version they downloaded from TPB since that version works better, doesn’t interfere with your computer, and loads faster. You might want to consider what incentive that provides.

In the battle between brand name products today and cheap knock-offs the savvy consumer usually buys the brand label, despite it being more expensive. The quality is usually better. Now imagine that you had a choice between buying a BMW or a no-brand chinese knock-off – which proved to be more fuel efficient and easier to drive because the BMW came attached with factory-throttling. You think anyone would buy a beamer? It’s the same issue.

You can say what you like about the legal issues regarding “infringement” but the fact of the matter is it’s a non-issue. Unless the alternatives become preferable due to the product quality and ease of purchase filesharing will remain an immovable constant. ESPECIALLY since there wil be no methods to stop or even slow it as long as we even have the internet and the concept of the personal computer.

The legal basis of “digital goods” (laughable term) is another debate entirely.

Your problem is you confuse the issue of digital goods with what crime-prevention methods can be considered valid in a paradigm where basic civil rights exist.

A very simple and very wrong explanation. Let me clarify.

Theft = You take something from someone else and that person loses it.
Copyright Infringement = You make a copy of a copy from a third party and the original owner retains the original.

If you are calling that theft then the person who uses his own raw material to bake oreos identical to the ones being sold at the local 7-11 is also a thief.

Similarly it is considered fair use even in the most draconian of nations to prepare copies of material for friends, aquaintances and family. The only thing differentiating filesharing from that procedure is that those people in turn allow others to make copies as well.

Although the last differentiation does form the legal basis for what is called “Copyright Infringement”, naming it “theft” is as accurate as calling participating in a first-person shooter game “murder”.

And no, a created copy can never be “money out of someone’s pocket”. If that were the case then the recording industry and artists would be able to claim a net profit of multiple times the world GNP each year if only filesharing did not exist.

In contrast those industries have turned up record profit each year irrespective of the status of filesharing.

To date there’s about a dozen or more peer-reviewed in-depth studies on the financial impact of filesharing performed by government-employed think tanks, universities, and NGO’s – all of which have disproven the nonsense you are spouting.

Now if you have any reliable data or studies which support your hypothesis and overturns the previous published works then by all means, feel free to share.
I seriously doubt it though. The recording industry has tried to prove loss of profit and financial impact due to filesharing since Napster’s days. And has utterly failed to do so for the last fifteen years.

Certainly. In Spain, for instance, it is quite legal to share any and all copyrighted works noncomercially and Spanish judges all the way up to their supreme courts have repeatedly thrown out every copyright case entered.

Where we’re talking about the UK the problem is mainly that extradition isn’t used for any crime short of actual assault or grand theft. The organized rolex peddling ring you describe would never even be considered for extradition. At most what you can expect is for the US interest to charge the UK citizens under local law.

I’ll go even one step further. It is quite possible for a US interest to raise a charge against a UK citizen under local UK law. The UK legal enforcement agencies will then – if a crime under applicable law is suspected – pursue the matter.

This hasn’t happened.

So you see, the reason for the extradition request is purely and simply because the administrators do not violate local national law and thus cannot be charged under it. In short this is exactly the same as if Latvia or Iran should demand the extradition of pro-gay activists from the US.

No matter which way you slice it, that just isn’t acceptable. We can’t have Saudi Arabian militant extremists try to extradite women drivers from foreign countries, We can’t have salman Rushdie extradited to Iran because his writings are punishable by death under Iranian sharia laws. And we can’t have the US extraditing people just because the country those people live in does not consider what they do a felony.