Additionally, it’s physical product production, distribution and attendant speculative financing that has been made technologically obsolete. I purchase from artists that self-produce/distribute or, more commonly, work on labels that pass a high share of revenue to the artists. Especially if the artist regains eventual control of copyright and/or has a contract allowing them control over parallel retailing channels. It’s non-artist copyright retention and, much worse, the aftermarket copyright brokerage industry that kills musicians and their relationship to listeners.

In the Wikipedia entry on the Streisand Effect, John Cleese of Monty Python fame notes on the controversy and protests surrounding their movie, The Life Of Brian:

“originally, the movie might have gone into 200 movie houses, and once the protests started, it was soon decided to put it into 600. So it is wonderful when people embark on a course of action that they can really achieve something so totally counterproductive…obviously if you don’t want people to see a movie, the thing to do is to just let it quietly die away, get a tiny little review on the movie page, and nobody knows about it. But if you do want to make a success of a movie…you want to get people cross and angry and protesting. It’s extraordinary”

Similarly, when the MAFIAA shut down Napster, it only made piracy spread even more. The French law has also had the opposite effect to what was intended.

DRM is like this as well – look at the recent examples, such as Spore (most pirated game ever) and Assassin’s Creed 2 (DRM cracked in less than a day).

I stopped listening to the radio years ago. It’s the same with the TV set, gone. Didn’t miss the spam, reruns, previews and shear emptiness for a second. No TV, no radio here. I do have my CD collection complete, most of it bought, quite a few bought twice or even more because of scratches on that ‘indestructible wonder of technology’, but I listen to downloaded MP3s. Occasionally I start a play list on Youtube or one of the many music services and sometimes I just listen to an internet radio station.

We hardly buy games anymore because we’ve had enough with registrations, DRMs eating resources, the need to be online constantly, the errors with DRM and bugs in games that are not patched. For applications, there are excellent freeware/open source alternatives and web2.0 web apps available for just anything.

As for movies, we watch movies first before we decide to buy them. That’s because it happened too many times we ended up buying crap. Even great actors and great directors make crap every once and a while. Fine, but I don’t want to spend a dime on something we don’t even watch until the end. For the movies we did buy we keep a pirated copy that we start. We’re completely fed up with warnings, warnings and warnings we cannot skip. Pirated copies just run without nagging and bugging. We even have some games where we play the pirated versions while the official versions live on the bookshelfs, never installed. Because of DRM and registration crap.

ACTA is a joke. In the eighties we had people crying that the tape recorder meant an end to the industry. In the early nineties it was the floppy disk and a bit later it was the CD writer. In the 2000′s it was the internet itself. It was a lot of tears. And guess what? Nothing. Most people just buy stuff they want. Some people don’t. That will never change. The only thing that does change is that honest people are getting more and more annoyed with companies who try to get every buck they can while ignoring the fact that every extra buck costs two bucks due to missed sales.

It’s time the industry wakes up and it’s time politicians and law makers wake up. It’s not 1970 anymore.

What decade are you living in? Bandwidth is dirt cheap nowadays. A few admins making $50-100k/yr isn’t exactly a prohibitive expense for a large entertainment company either. There is no way the cost of online distribution even comes remotely close to the distribution of tens of millions of physical records worldwide… The profit margins on digital media must be enormous. I think few people can dispute that the days of the entertainment industry, at least in its current form, are numbered.

…because we must share MORE and that’s such a good incentive. ;-)

You have no idea.

There’s:
Server Costs.
Energy Costs.
Bandwidth Costs.
Labor Costs(Yes the Admin that has to keep the Servers running).
So all in all the only difference is that you may get things faster with less quality(MP3 VS PCM), period.

Oh NO we’re not !

You’re stupid.

I have a feeling that sales started to drop right around the moment that the studios started sueing!

Still isn’t working, is it Neo/Reasoned?

The police state cannot stop piracy. The best chance they have is on DC hubs (to gain evidence of substantial infringement)… but with torrents, it’s a shitload of minor infringements that are hardly worth taking to court individually.

yeah! this story has entered the popular today section on popurls.com…

Not just only the music industry, but the every other online industry.