OMG, do we have one of the RIAA's army of brainwashed zombies among us oO? I agree that if you download music 24/7 and never spend a penny on a CD you are doing something wrong, but downloading does not neccesarily equate to stealing.
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In order to steal something you actually have to take something away from someone that they had, that they won't have anymore once you take it. Therefore, you can't really steal non-material goods. Personally I think the whole concept of possesion really breaks down if you try to apply it to something that doesn't physically exist. But nonetheless, copyright law attempts to do that, and fails rather miserably.
I think the current system of copyright that we have really doesn't work that well when it comes to data transmitted via the internet, because there are so many ways you can argue against it's validity. For one, data is really just a bunch of 1's and 0's, it is completely meaningless without interpretation. MP3's are useless unless you have software that can decode them, so how do you argue that what they are actually is copyrighted music? If someone developed a codec that somehow decodeded a DLL in windows as a copyrighted song, does that mean Microsoft has to start paying the RIAA royalies? Another thing, if you can sell something that can be duplicated infinately, then isn't that like a liscence to print money? It breaks the system of capitalism to allow people to do this.
Of course no one wants to admit these problems because if they did they would actually have to figure out a way to fix them, and I don't think either the government or the RIAA has any clue how to do that.
Well Personally I believe the solution is a flat fee to download as much as you want. You could have seporate fees for all the major types of media (music, movies, video games, ect.) so everything could be priced fairly according to the overhead involved in production. This would work, and people would be happy since they wouldn't be limited to how much entertainment they could enjoy by how much money they happen to have at a given time, as long as they could afford the flat fee. The people who created the content would get the money they deserve as well, as long as the flat fee agreed upon is fair. The RIAA is too greedy for this type of thing though. They think it's easier to bleed people dry if you charge them seporately for every song they want to hear. Believe me, they'd charge you per listen for a song if they could.
Anyway, for now I say download what you want as long as you are continuing to contribute money to the people responible for creating it, even if you can't afford to pay for everything you get. As long as you do this, the industies supported by copyrighted works will be fine, and eventually this whole mess in the copyright system will be fixed. If however you don't pay for anything, and you can afford to do so, then you can rest assured that you are the type of person who will be responsible for all of us getting screwed over by greedy corporate goons.
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Umm... so, if you disagree with my views feel free to debate them, but let's not start a flame war ok

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