http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/us-government-finally-admits-most-piracy-estimates-are-bogus.ars?comments=1#comments-bar

C’mon neo, you can do better than that! This has nothing to do with morality, but with laws… laws that are increasingly out of touch with reality, i.e. with the way people behave.

You may moan about the loss of respect for Copyright, but is that loss of respect really so surprising? Copyright was NEVER meant to have such long terms. It was a social contract between creators and and the people. By abusive extensions of copyright terms from 20 years after creation of the work to 70 years after the death of the author, and quasi-perpetual copyright for DRM-infested and corporate works, the people have been heavily short-changed by the content lobby in this social contract. The balance has been tipped way too far towards creators (and their exploiters, a.k.a. labels, publishers etc…), up to a point that it starts to fall apart.

A social contract that is increasingly biased towards one side will inevitably become irrelevant, because the other side WILL stop respecting it. No legal threats can stop this, because it is a universal social pattern of behavior.

neostyles, you’d have a much easier role here if you were at least advocating SANE copyright laws. But simply moaning that people don’t respect copyright laws AS THEY ARE NOW, won’t gain you much traction nor sympathy, you know? You’d better advocate reforming copyright, lest it breaks down totally in a few years… because in its current maximalist and anti-people form, IT WILL collapse (and then, even small indies will pay the price).

Nevertheless, the music and media lobby in italy is very strong: we’re the ONLY country in the world where we have to pay a royalty tax on ALL KINDS of digital media (CD, DVD, hard disks, Compact Flash, SD/SDHC, iPod, phones with internal memoty, ALL).