This reminds me of the old website mp3.com. Remember that site? This was back in the infancy of digital distribution models, possibly before it’s time, but it was a fantastic concept where independent artists could upload their music and promote it in one central location and even get paid for it. All content uploaded was original works by the artists themselves. What happened to mp3.com? Sony bought it, shut it down, then re-opened it as a “Sony Records” download site which was a failure, and so they abandoned it. They did not care to capitalize off of a site which was showing great success. They simply just wanted it gone, so that you could not bypass the gate keepers of the music industry.

Another big beef that I have is not with copyright law itself, which I do support, but with the bizzarre contortions it’s taken on in recent times. It makes sense to provide a temporary period of monopoly for a content creator/artist to solely profit off of their works for the purpose of innovation, but when you get these obscenely long periods of time that copyrights last nowadays, it does quite the opposite of encouraging innovation and creativity on two front.

1. The first front is with the companies holding the copyrights themselves. There is no incentive for a company to CONTINUE producing high quality product for consumers, because they can simply lock down indefinitely all content and rest on their laurels in perpetuity, which has a drastic stagnation effect.

2. Innovation in art has ALWAYS revolved around variations of existing work. There are only so many stories that can be told, or notes that can be played. In this day and age, blues, jazz, and even rap and electronic music would never have come about. And if you really think about it, none of the classical music would either, as they all based it on variations of existing music as well. 

This entire issue has nothing whatsoever with money. It has to do with market control. Monopolists inherently despise the free market, and typically look to government to legislatively keep them in economic control, whilst crushing with the force of government, their emerging competitors. It’s true that some have too much of an entitlement mentality when it comes to file sharing, but there is certainly a better way to attack this problem than to “write another law”. As a content creator, I do NOT support any attempt to pass new legislation to clamp down on the free market, even if it could possibly have economic benefit. 

The same way bottled water successfully competes with tap water even in such areas where the tap water is actually better than most of the bottled one.

Even Rebecca Black managed to sell her song “Friday” – published on Youtube, as a 2000-dollar production as a lark – on iTunes to the tune of several hundred thousands of copies sold.

Ask Linus Torvald whether he regrets making Linux “free”.

If any artist manages to create something unique or get known, money will come if he has but the sense of holding out his hands. This is well known to marketing departments everywhere as soon as the words “Brand label” are discussed.

If you are speaking in honest ignorance then you seriously need to read up on how money can be made in an open market. If your question was rhetorical, then by all means keep asking it. It’s been answered any number of times. Backed by empirical evidence and scientific studies it’s already been shown that you cannot even prove that there IS a lost sale even when file sharing of a file is rampant.

1) There is no valid argument for in effect and practice abolishing the right of free speech and free communication. No matter how many people decide to copy file A from person A on the internet.

4) If an industry can not make money without a monopoly then that industry has no place in the market. Period.

Wrapping falsehoods and outright lies into polite language and emotional arguments does not make you any more correct on any of those points.

Then again, I’m personally highly in favor of speaking about facts the way they are – not in the way I would like them to be.

Apparently you are not.

By providing a value added service. Let’s take the example of steam (even though steam has DRM on it). What they provide is a platform for buying, cataloguing, playing games. They created a community. People are more than willing to pay for games on steam. Why? Because they get service. Once you make a purchase on steam, the item you bought is added to your account. You install it, you play it. Say you want to play on you friend’s computer. You open steam, login and download. Simple as that. There are no computer limits, and the DRM will let you play if you have no internet connection. Hell, it could be absent and I still would get my computer games on steam simply for its ease of use and the fact that the library follows me wherever I go.

Just sayin