This is a rather long but thoughtful look at the fate of the media Cartels
http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north431.htmlExecutives in the British phonograph industry are terminally naïve. They spent hundreds of thousands of pounds to hire a team of lawyers to sue a few unnamed men who downloaded music from the web. They got two convictions. Imagine that! Two whole convictions.
Compare the word "two" with "millions."
WHAT ARE MY ODDS?
The recording industry thinks that millions of file-swappers are as naïve as executives in the recording industry are. First, hardly anyone who swaps files reads newspapers. They will not see the headline about their imminent doom, unless they read it on the web. People who read things on the web tend be way ahead of executives in the phonograph industry, digitally speaking. Second, hardly any of them care. They think to themselves, "They'll never catch me!" They are correct. To catch millions of people and convict them, one by one, is impossible.
The record industry naïvely imagines that people who know enough about digital technology to upload and download music files are not clever enough to figure out that the record industry is bluffing. As for the news article, these people do not know what a "general counsel" is.
BPI general counsel Roz Groome said: "We have been very patient litigators. We have given these people every opportunity to settle.
"Only when they refused to settle did we take them to court, which has now found in our favour. These rulings are a massive step forward in the music industry's bid to fight illegal filesharing.
"We would warn anyone else tempted to illegally upload and download music to cease immediately. The legal penalties can be significant."
Patient litigators, indeed! Any firm can run up a bill of a few hundred thousand pounds in order to take a year to get into a court and get a convictions on two men, thereby having the court impose fines of a few thousand pounds, which the industry probably will not collect. The industry faces a challenge in mass audience persuasion.
Get this message to millions of file-sharers.
Convince them that the courts will be able to extract blood (money) out of a turnip (the income of unemployed teenage file-sharers and young adults, millions of whom who are on the dole).
Convince them that the odds are against them rather than the phonograph industry.
Keep them from downloading files from millions of computers located outside the country.
Convince fanatically dedicated technologists not to develop new schemes that foil the lawyers.
I see this guy has the same outlook as myself, we are both fed up with greedy theives who run a near monopoly on the music industry dictating to the artist and consumer alike that they know whats good for us..
The polite word for this is "hogwash", I,m sure you readers can think of other names for them.
