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not trying to ascertain to one side or the other, but there was a big to do when cassettes first came out, and people were taping songs off the radio. the RIAA tried to stop this and were unsucessful...
if i have a CD, and my buddy wants to make a copy, so be it. i have paid for the CD, and am not profitting on its distribution. my buddy may like it so much that he either goes out and buys it, or buys other distributions down the road, which profits the music industry and the artists in the long run...and that is a valid argument.
downloading copyrighted material is wrong (however, i have a problem with this...if you were and are able to tape songs off the radio, isn't this the same concept?), but people will continue to do so. if you choose to do so, you do so knowing the consequences if you get caught. if you do not, that is your prerogative...
and not to discredit your argument SBF, because it is a very valid one, but when you purchase a CD for anywhere from 5 bucks to 20 bucks, 100% of the funds do not go directly to the artist. they get a very small percentage, hence why a good number of artists support file sharing, legal or otherwise. for the most part, i will buy CDs direct, either at show, or off a band's website...knowing that they get a bigger cut of the monies. however, i do understand that any download will take money out of an artist's pocket...nowadays, i download music that is readily available on an artist's website...
this is why i also support Open Source software. it gives the average programmer the ability to take an idea and make it his/her own, as long as they continue to make it open source. in college, i pirated software left and right...i was poor and needed the use of the software that I could not afford otherwise. now, you can find very affordable or free equivalents of a lot of Microsoft, Adobe, Macromedia, etc products online...including whole operating systems.
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