First, I didn't say stealing a file is the same as asking a friend for a dub. Strictly speaking it is. What's different is all in the effect it has on the industry, your "friends" don't have 300 records, and don't copy them for 5 other friends. Rather, someone somewhere has what you want, and tons and tons of people can make a dub for themselves, via peer-to-peer means (don't delude yourself, most pirating is now done this way, and peer-to-peer is the greatest problem the industry wish to put an end to. Peer-to-peer was one of the "internet community"'s answers to the industry going after the "first gen" way to exchange content via downloading on sites like Napster). There's no site uploading and hosting files anymore, it's all private individuals sharing their content (even though it often involves someone somewhere obtaining the files not from his private collection, but through the other type of pirate site. That's far from always true for released material - e.g. after a DVD has been released (or a show is broadcast), several people rip it and make the file available on their computer and others obtain it via peer-to-peer, and on and on, but that's always true for movies still in theaters and so on).

I rather said that peer-to-peer has replaced that practice of making dubs for friends. 30 years ago when I was a teenager, when someone wanted an album and couldn't or wouldn't pay for it, he turned to his friends if they had the record and made a dub for himself. Some people objected to that, not because dubbing was illegal, but usually because they didn't like that they had paid for it and their friends were getting it for free. Among big lovers of music back then, it was common to make sure not to buy the same records, to have more we could exchange. That was new, thanks to new technologies. In the 1990s, this became officially illegal but continued unhindered - with no realistic means to stop that, so the industry wanted recording media to be taxed, and that money given them as a compensation (in Canada at least, these demands by artists/entertainment industry were turned down).

Dubbing wasn't possible for my dad, in his time they only had to expensive professional reel-to-reel recorders and pick-ups and 8-track decks. Your record was broken/worn off, you bought another copy. You didn't want to pay? You listened to the radio. It's technologies from the 80s only that let you easily make dubs, and prolong the life of your collection and so on.

As for making dubs for friends, these laws are different from one country to another. As far as I know, in the US it is perfectly illegal as it is not covered by the definition of authorized reproduction for private use, even loaning the original or a copy to a friend with or without profit is illegal. It lets you make as many copies as you wish for yourself, your household. That's it for reproductions.

Nowadays, the person who thinks that way (I have no money or don't want to pay) usually download what he wants illegally instead of looking around for friends who have it and pirate it from them.

I'm not trying to argue this has the same effect on the industry - only a fool would try to argue this. At the core it's the same action of finding an alternative to get for free something someone would want you to pay for. And both are illegal.

And yes, several type of reproduction are legal (in the US). Why? Because the US legislators stood up to the copyright owners back then, in the name of preserving what they decided were your rights and what the industry wanted was abusive. They once complained that radio would destroy their industry, and that people should pay to get music broadcasts, that the music industry was making money off them too (on that, they had a point, and it was addressed). I don't know for sure how the US dealt with that, but in Canada they made the stations pay small fees to play a song, money that return to the artists played on the radio down the line. They didn't outlaw radio, or made it a paying service only.

Many years after radio, when recording techs became widespread (late 80s) they did try in the 90s to go after them and to get laws passed in congress to stop people from making dubs, and taping movies off TV. They claimed this would kill their video rental industry and destroy their system of syndication etc. as people could tape and keep forever what they wanted off TV - and rewatch without watching the ads and this would eventually destroy how they financed networks, that they would make dubs of rented material, loan it to their friends and so on. Some wanted the VCR/tape decks technologies outlawed altogether for the home market - they would be the end of the entertainment industry which money would all end up in the hands of the Japanese high-tech industry. This backfired, in part. Congress not only determine the new technologies would stay and the industry could not hinder technological development and economy in the name of preserving its copyrights, but that those who bought them had the right to use them for what their were advertised to do. Congress chose instead to narrowly define what constituted illegal uses of those equipments. That's when the laws that made it illegal to have, for e.g. publics showing of material licensed for home use using those devices, when it was made a crime to distribute the material to others for or without profit. Much to the chagrin of the industry, Congress defined in those laws a great deal of things they wanted outlawed as "fair use" and "private use". In the US, they won more. In several other countries, "fair use" is more extended legally (some allow dubbing to friends, most don't).

Many MPAA members didn't like rental at first either - they feared it would undermine not only theater attendance (it did, because many customers preferred the new alternative of rental) but also their market to sell rights to TV networks. They were slow in making titles available early on, kept any they wanted to get second runs in theaters eventually unavailable for rental (eg: Star Wars, Raiders and so on - many of the most demanded titles, to foster a demand they then met by a new theatrical run) and they were charging very heavy prices to stores to get them (several hundred bucks a copy initially, limiting a lot how many titles a store could buy and rentabilize, and making it a business requiring an heavy initial investment to open), and made them available only after they had sold rights to cable, and so on. And yes, the increase of popularity of rentals is when the number of movies bought by networks started to plummet (it's now a fringe source of revenue for the studios), because ratings for them were not was they were (people preferred to rent, and watch when they wanted, without ads and interruptions) and that means they didn't make as much money from advertising, and preferred to augment their percentage of original content to draw in viewers. Then at some point the MPAA understood their markets had changed and had new demands and it reduced its pricing to stores so they would pop up everywhere like mushrooms, and made available to them many more titles, and shortened the timeframe between theatrical and rental releases. They adapted. They didn't want to, they've always been extremely conservative and always have preferred to get new laws forbidding things than meeting customer demands, but the legislators wouldn't meet their demands and considered the limits they wanted to put on people's freedoms and choices were abusive, so they had no choice to look at what people wanted, and give it to them. That's also when they started pumping more and more money into movies, to have productions people would prefer to see in theaters, that wouldn't be as interesting watched at home.

You may not remember this, but how do you think the industry dealt with this piracy once the legislators didn't give them what they wanted about dubbing/recording technologies in the 90s? They turned and analyzed what people seemed to want: they wished to be able to see our products when they want and as many times they want. They don't want to pay over and over to rent again and again. They presently make dubs, low quality, or tape of broadcast, again low quality. Their answer was creating the retail home market, make available their movies and TV shows to own. At first, they were massively overpriced, and this was encouraging people to make illegal dubs again, and so they adjusted pricing. To preserve rental outlets, they reduced their prices to them to. It's become a HUGE source of income eventually. They were not were keen on the digital technologies at first either. They feared those were of too high quality, and would make piracy/contraband more attractive and easier. They tried hard to keep the high-tech industry from introducing recording devices for the home market, and some were very slow at joining in and offering their stuff on DVD. Didn't work, of course. They (IRRC, it was Sony that was working on that) tried to devise copy-protection that would have spyware included to spot illegal copies in computers and erase them, or would break your machine if you tried to watch a copied DVD. That was killed in the bud fast, it was illegal and no door opened to legalize this.

You see the pattern? New means of pirating have appeared, and rather than answering fast to meets the new demands, the industry turns to the legislators, even before actually eliminating first the same causes of piracy that have always been there and they had to address many time before: their products are overpriced, their business model has again become outdated, and they have not been fast enough to identify what their customers now want, and address these demands. "Offer" is always just one side of the equation, and it's always offer that needs to adjust itself to demand.

That's how you begin to deal with contraband and black market/piracy. It's almost always a problem with Offer vs. Demand. First step, try to identify and eliminate as many of the motives of the customers, alongside reasonable, prudent measures against the providers. If you try to go all out with punishing laws and harsh means, you just drive the criminals to be cleverer, and going deeper underground, further out of reach. This is exactly what happened here a few years ago with cigarettes. Our governments got greedy and overtaxed them, and eventually contraband grew from a fringe phenomenon to something so widespread your grandmother would buy contraband cigarettes without a second thought. The problem: the US barely taxed them, and the American tobbacco companies were complicit in selling them to Natives (whose reserve stands on the border, with one half on US soil and one on Canadian soil)in huge quantities they knew would end up in Canada illegally. Our natives distributed them, and as the market grew, it was no longer individuals going to the reserve and selling their stuff at work and so on, it was organized crime that got involved. When the police took harsher means and our government convinced yours to get the FBI to act, its firearms that also entered our side of the reserve. We tried to get the US goverment to introduce laws to penalize your tobbacco industry and make them pay for each pack of cigarettes seized on our side that could be proven to have been sold to smugglers (that failed), we tried to have harsher penalties. Retail stores were clamoring for the government to see the light and lower the prices before they were run out of business, but met a deaf ear. The whole thing was not only causing massive loss of revenues, fighting it was more and more expensive, and fighting it was creating new social problems, some potentially more harmful than contraband and its effects (those now heavily armed natives ended up causing us big problems a few years later) Finally the governments gave in. People won't pay such high prices for cigarettes anymore, let's work harder to a) educate them and convince them to stop smoking (which worked, decreasing smoking by tens of points of percentage over a few years) and b) lower the taxes massively. The problem vanished in a matter of months, the government found new ways to get the same money from us.

So that's what I think the MPAA and co. should be encouraged to do by Congress (that is, by refusing laws à la SOPA/PIPA for now, or being extremely prudent and restrained in what new measures they introduce). Use the means at your disposal to deal with pirate sources, and do your work to eliminate the phenomemon of piracy by adjusting your offer to the current demand. Then we'll reconsider, if piracy remains a pressing problem.

Understand I'm not an advocate of piracy and doing nothing about it - I applauded when Megaupload got shut down - keep that in mind when you answer me. When Napster was becoming popular, I was still that guy who was mail ordering CD and vinyls from small shops or even artists from all over the world. The internet revolution for me was that I suddenly had access to up to date digital catalogues instead of getting those via the mail, and could use email to socialize with the vendors about music, ask them questions and pay via credit cards instead of bank transfers etc., which made it far easier for me to obtain my stuff in foreign countries, especially those with no or shabby agreements in place to exchange funds. I never liked piracy. Even when I had dubs from friends, I liked to buy the records when the money was available or I could find them (with the music I listen to, this always was an issue).

I'm not opposed to the goal of stopping it, I'm opposed to the means the big entertainment industry wants to get in the name of stopping it. I'm not even opposed universally or on general principles, I'm opposed to it as this juncture. I would actually be in favour of giving news means to the music industry (if not quite those SOPA/PIPA granted them), that has done its homework, but I consider the video industry doesn't have and must before we go to the next step. And you can't give it to one but not everyone, so basically it's the video industry the music one should lobby heavily to modernize itself like they have started doing already.

I think the laws they have in mind wouldn't be effective in the first place (I'm not going to repeat everything said about that), had the potential to do great harm not only to people who have nothing to do with pirating but to whole business sectors and to the internet culture in general, and that it's still too early to consider such radical means when the industry itself has not done its homework to modernize its business model and adapt it to the new realities. The industry already has tons of laws worlwide protecting its copyrights that they are not using to the extent they could and should (complaints of piracy can already trigger an FBI inquiry and get you convicted of a federal crime with fines of 250,000$ and up to 5 years in federal prison, remember that. And yes, this applies even to individuals making dubs for their friends the old way. And that's aside the other means they have to sue those convicted for their lost money.) It's long, it's expensive, so the owners can pretty much only go after the big fish, but it's big money they claim to lose from those people. They got to Megaupload this way, and there's many more similar services still around they can go at the very same way. Peer-to-peer is an even bigger problem, yes, but going after the downloading sites would reduce the "offering", make it more and more difficult to at least get products that aren't even on the market. I'm not opposed at all to making sites specialized in sharing information to facilitate/permit peer-to-peer exchanges of illegal material, that don't take steps to pull down those links when a copyright owner notify them - not as long as those laws are well designed, and narrowly focussed. I'm not opposed to laws that let a MPPA member go after a site like RAFO if it let its users post links to illegal content and refuse to pull them down when notified. I am for now opposed to laws that would let the same owner of content go to a judge and get RAFO blacklisted, and its advertisers penalized and in risk of law suits, without even proving in a trial first and beyond doubt that this is the result of neglect/malfeasance by the site's owner and not simply not identifying the material as copyrighted. and other similar causes.

I'm not a big fan of drugs either, that doesn't mean I don't think the "war on drugs" has done far more damage to your society, social and financial, than good.

There's several reasons for this. One is that there's no profit in it for them at the end. Peanuts financially. What they could accomplish is setting examples to frighten other individuals from doing this. But there's a huge risk to their image. You're American, you know what would happen if the RIAA member got a poor schmoe in federal prison for making a dub of Madonna for a friend for no profit, even though they have the right to... Tons of people (incl yourself) think that this is a case of legal reproduction. It's those kinds of laws that are there mostly for show and as a mild discouragement of the practice, but if the big corporate powers actually used them, it would backfire on them, on the artists involved, and it might not take long before the voters want those laws repelled (and that's why the industry rather wanted the recording devices not allowed... they know these laws are in practice useless to them. This is also why they've abandonned the avenue of criminilazing further the actions of the end customer).

What some of the MPAA members do (in Canada, at least - quite a few cases surfaced recently) is send very threatening letters (asking notably for heavy damages) to individuals for illegal downloads, and very threatening letters to internet service providers, asking them for reports of activies of users and so on. That was illegal in Canada and the government slapped them on the wrist and is keeping a closer on them now - they were threatening people with legal procedures that don't even apply here, others that contradict our laws. To avoid abusive procedures, our law also specifies a service provider (nor a generalist search engine, like Google, and sites like YouTube and so on) can't be sued because its customers may indulge in criminal activities in its back. It's also illegal for them to provide information about the activites of their customers to a third party without a mandate. Anyway, what they were really trying to do was frighten people up. They would have been wiser to act within the limits of the law, and perhaps this would have worked a bit. All they got instead was making it more widely known to the public they can ignore those letters if they ever get one.

I haven't heard of them doing this in the US too yet. Perhaps they do.

You could "send" no copy at all. You could make it available to others, by uploaoding them to sites like Napster. Napster itself was just offering the servers, not uploading or distributing anything. You did not get any profit from uplaoding. (Small) sites that tried to charge for downloads, or rewarded for uploads, were the earliest victims, much easier targets than Napster and co. The problem was that it fell in a grey area a bit. You did not reproduce the content as much, just moving it to a public place. The laws were adjusted or interpreted (not sure which in the US) to put this under the "illegal reproduction" category of existing laws, and Napster and co. were shut down.

Let's set the facts straight about Pirate Bay. It is vastly different from Megaupload, but you don't seem to understand really the difference. It doesn't distribute any illegal content. Pirate Bay is a place to go to get links to torrents, the biggest one. It hosts no illegal content itself. You put that information in your peer-to-peer app, and you exchange the data peer-to-peer. What's immoral about Pirate Bay is that it shamelessly let its users post links to illegal content, not just legal (I don't know its history well enough to discuss if it ever pretended to police, or if it ever pulled down links when asked or anything. A problem was that providing links wasn't illegal, there was no content there a content provider could legally force Pirate Bay to pull down). Even though it wasn't initially doing anything illegal as such, it's a new reality, a new intermediary that facilitates piracy, and innovation by people in favour of piracy. Pirate Bay itself isn't pirating, just helping those who wishes to do it, peer-to-peer, without profit involved on their part. Pirate Bay wasn't making money from illegal content, but by providing a site were people could exchange torrent information. To deal with Pirate Bay, what it did had to be defined as illegal. IIRC, that's ongoing.

You do realize I hope that going against sites like Pirate Bay (as opposed to Megauploads and all its clones) is not so easy, because technically, you can also get links to torrents, to peer-to-peer software, to sites like Pirate Bay, via search engines like Google. You can find some hidden in videos uploaded on YouTube. You can find "rogue blogs" all over the place, that the corporations like Google, WordPress etc. pull down, when it finds them (or is notified), and that it's not so easy to draw the line in law between Pirate Bay and the services of companies like Google and co. Wikipedia isn't immune to an user passing copyrighted data as his own, and those are damn hard to find (to Wikipedia, and to copyright owners as well). Not easy to criminalize what Pirate Bay does, and not place the "good guys" in precarious positions too and their business potentially at risk, and PIPA/SOPA did just that.

Another very important point, not often enough discussed. The corporations that benefit the most from piracy, and technology-wise made the biggest contribution to making it easy and affordable, are ISP. The ability to download content is a massive factor why people wanted faster connections, and the ISP not only met the demand, but anticipated it. Before movies were even available legally on the net, the ISP introduced the means to download/stream them. And they are making HUGE profits. If you take the share of bandwidth use that consists of piracy, it would be much, much greater than the profits of the pirate sites.... Most of the money from piracy goes into these pockets.

A very great deal of people wish that to be addressed somehow (71% people in Canada would be in favour of this, and willing to pay an monthly extra) - essentially it's very similar to radio back in the days - but there's no obvious model for it, aside from taxing and re injecting that money into culture via subventions/compensations, at the height of how much each owner has invested into the economy each year. Others are opposed to models like this, as copyright owners not touched that much from piracy would get money - it's a bit weird though, as most of the money would de facto go to the big investors, that are the ones most harmed by piracy, and claiming the big losses. In short, taking from the pocket of the ISP, who make so much money because people wish fast connections in a good part because of pirating habits, and give it back to the content producers to compensate them for losses.

Not nearly as much anymore as you would think as far as music is concerned, as those people making studies aren't idiots. They have data to work from. They know how much the RIAA sold records pre-internet. They know how much they sell now with the new services. They can analyze market evolutions, and all sort of complex variables. Not only that, but their methodologies are part of their studies. You have to be aware that even the RIAA in part admits this, and admits the new services are helping them recuperate their market (just not enough and fast enough to their taste).

It's the industry that is far from transparent with its numbers and how they've arrived to them. Many experts openly challenge those numbers, saying to differ so much from independant studies, they have to have estimated the total number of downloads and calculated all of them as "losses" (among other things, like not taking into accounts studies showing that percentages of illegal downloads lead to purchases, and not only that but also often to purchasing additional products after, the owner may not have sold them if not for the fact the customer got to know them via piracy).

No it's not.

Let's put aside right away the part of piracy/contraband resulting from poverty, social inequalities and such - the kind where poor people want luxury goods they can't get, and so there's market for illegal cheap copies, and theft. And the part where a criminal introduce on the market a product, passing it for the real deal.

Otherwise, when piracy/contraband become widespread, a mainstream phenomenon in society(and it's what we're talking of here, most definitely), it's when enough consummers have left the legal market for some reason, that they no longer consider doing so to be criminal behavior, law or no law. That reason is almost always a problem with offer. You introduce prohibition, you send all the people who still want to drink to the speakeasies and such. You overprice your goods, you go out of business, or a black market appear. You overtax a product, the same happens. You keep your offer too low on purpose, you run the risk that value will go up massively and clever amoral people will manage to buy them in place of your end customers, and sell it back to them for far more money than you do make on your product, or pirate copies will surface. You refuse to do a second concert even though there's people willing to pay to attend, you make sure scalpers will make a shitload of money.

And this is exactly what is happening with entertainment. Records were not cheap at retail, and it wasn't cheap to promote them or distribute them, and give a margin of profit to retailers and so on. Recording devices arrived, and yes sales decreased a bit, and prices went down (they were able to raise them again how? With the introduction of CD, far more durable, practical and of better audio quality). The internet arrived, and sales fell massively, and destroyed the market. People don't want to pay the prices of the 90s for music anymore. The price of CD has dropped, massively (to the point very few retailers can afford to sell only music). In time, the industry found ways to sell recorded music differently, and for lower prices (and much reduced costs, by the way - the profit margin hasn't changed that much and the problem is that they still sell less than before at this point).

That's hard facts Joel. Want it or not, the internet has devalued products like movies and music. Too many people don't want to pay those prices anymore, and want new ways to watch those products too, means that technology is here to offer. It won't change any time soon. Yes, it might mean the industry will never again make as big profits as they used too. Yes, it might mean in the long run that selling recorded music is no longer on its own a viable way for commercial empires to survive, and even that the days of such empires will be over eventually. Yes, it might mean the days are coming to an end when Hollywood can spend 150,000 millions on a single movie, and 150,000 more to promote it may come to an end, because there's no market left to rentabilize such investments.

And yes, it may well mean the concept of copyright will have to be re thought completely. It's not been here for that long, you know. It was introduced in order to promote culture, to generate more artists, to democratize the arts, that were at the time mostly in reach of people with money, who could afford to write (mostly). They were meant to make it possible for someone to make a career in the arts, and make it into a small business, and like any other business, pass it or profits from its sale, as a legacy to your children.

It did have these effects, and more and more American writers appeared, and performers were no longer so dead poor, and it gave birth to the record industry in time and so on.

But we also know what happened too: people found ways to use to laws for another purpose altogether. They built empires. They made their artists really popular, but took a large part of the profits from their intellectual property. Copyrights have long stopped to encourage the emergence and survival of higher culture, it now benefits mostly entertainment, in direct and terribly unequal competition with higher culture. Higher culture has long been back to mecenate, to governement grants and other form of public money to finance itself.

It may well be that the time of those empires is counted Joel, that people will reclaim popular culture as their own, as existed a little over a hundred years ago. Technology is there and cheaper and cheaper. More and more people make movies, more and more people write books and publish them on the net bypassing the industry, more and more people make music and publish it for free. It's estimated that in 10 years there may be a million "broadcasters" of content in the US alone. All those people are in competition with the "industry" and more and more they will be. And the means are there for them to be heard, seen, read - and one thing is that these means are often the very same by which "illegal content" circulate, and if you cut them down, you deprive the first of their freedom of expression. It's not only piracy the MPAA and co. want to eradicate, you need to see this. It's also their emerging competition they wish to hinder and slow down. There's only so much time in a day. People's habits have changed massively, they spend far less time in front of a TV, far less time in theaters. The time people spend on youtube, the time they make content for their blogs, their home movies, writing fiction and so on - because now affordable (free, if not for website maintenance, or ISP fees and so on) distribution is available to nearly everyone, not only Hollywood. It used to be more complicated, just a few years ago. You needed to set up a website, pay for it and its maintenance and so on. Now you can use a free blog, upload your content to you tube and even embed it on your blog. More and more promotional tools are available too, for free. It's already a reality that many people prefer to spend leisure time watching cats do crazy stuff on YouTube, or write reviews, or create fiction and so on rather than watching content from the Industry. And yes, this is hurting the entertainment industry big time. Giving them the means to shut as many "distribution outlets" with ease, because any little instance of copyright violation may occur on them, all in the name of targeting the real pirate sites, is really really not wise at this juncture. They're not so pleased more and more content creators (professional) turn to YouTube to advertise or distribute movies (documentaries so far, mostly) that didn't stand a chance of being distributed by the "system" a few years ago. Part of the reason they're so reluctant to switch to digital distribution is that the minute they do, their competitors will do as well, and tons of people will start using those as their favourite way to watch content. Right now, they control the distributors, they have mean to keep too many foreign movies out of the US market. They're not idiots, they know since DVD a much greater percentage of Americans now buy commercial cinema from abroad, not only the art-house people. They know, just watching at their markets abroad, that one reason why the Americans "don"t like" those as much as many other nations do is they had little access to them (they've kept them out of the American distribution networks, out of American TV and whenever they see a movie with enough commercial potential, they buy the rights and do a remake of it...) and never got a good look or developped a taste for them. Abroad too they've developped means to try to saturate and control the markets with their products, do what they could to keep the competition away, make sure they didn't get enough of a share of the market to be able to create a genuine commercial industry of their own. They know they have no control over outlets like i-tune and co. No way to keep them from offering content from all over the world on an equal footing, or stop those productions from underselling them. They know those "next gen" outlets are as accessible to independant productions, foreign commercial cinema, just as much as it will be accessible to them. And they know they might be forced to adjust their pricing.

Don't be naive, they also have an eye on the new entertainment industry - their competitors for people's attention when it comes to fill leisure time - fuelled in Silicon Valley and tons of other similar places abroad. If news laws are introduced to help them deal with piracy, they need to be very narrow in scope and focussed, and take fully into account "collateral damages" they might cause.

It might well be that the era during which big entertainment empires based on exploiting copyrighted content will have last 100, 150 years, and new models will have to emerge, in a world very different from the time when copyright was created as a concept.

Some artists are already saying it: the days when they could live on recorded music are gone, and want it or not, artists may have to be back to performances as their main source of revenues.

They were much would want a share of the profits of the ISP too. The Canadian government just refused that demand (from a coaltion of content providers/creators - in the US it would have had the MPAA, RIAA and co. involved) again today. I think it's sad, personally.

No Joel, in the context it's not at all a valid comparison.

To take your example, here's what happens (it's not a perfect analogy, but still):

It's not one guy stealing a camaro, it's a pandemic of car theft. It becomes mainstream, common practice that people no longer buy cars but go pick them underground dealers that steal them from the car makers and retailers, and customers don't seem to consider that theft anymore, and their neighbours don't lift a finger to stop them and report them. Impossible that so many people suddenly turn into criminals because they no longer consider this a criminal act? Well, that's precisely what's happened with entertainment (yes, in a large part because it's much easier and safer to thieve from your chair at home...). As absurd as that: theft of content has become pandemic and commonplace, because people no longer consider it theft.

Part of the answer to that is education, but it's only a small part of the answer.

What would be the obvious conclusion: obviously, people are not stealing stereos in stores, and their neighbour's TV and such. It's not that everyone is suddenly a big criminal at heart. It's rather that cars must be too expensive, or there's something very wrong with the service offered by dealers, or they no longer offer what people want and they don't wish to buy them, just use them for free. They've lost so much of their financial value as products that at the current price and conditions, too many people refuse to buy them, even if it's illegal. So many people no longer care or agree with these views that it's become terribly difficult for authorities to deal with the phenomenon. The first step to stop that wouldn't be to put tons more public money into policing, or introduce policies that would risk putting trains, planes and public transport into jeopardy - especially not ones which appear right from the start they may not be very effective to stop the pandemic of car thefts. It would be for the car industry to deal with its problems of offer (price, distribution, whatever the offer problems are). The laws exist, the police forces exist. One reason they're not as effective as they could be is that the phenomenon has become too widespread, and you first need to reduce it to a much smaller problem - bring it back to a problem or real criminality and deal with it, but before then, make it so all the average joes who aren't criminal at heart are convinced again to buy their cars, because you give them cars for prices they will pay, in conditions they will like. If you can't do that, better get out the car industry right now. You can't sell cars to people who don't want to pay for them, whatever alternative means they take to get them.

And it's also rather like people stopping to buy from Chevy and buying other cars, because Ford and co were overpriced, paid their employees and managers too much, badly managed themselves, had completely failed to innovate or to provide the cars people wanted. Their offer didn't meet demand, and they paid heavily for it. In their case they didn't face piracy, they left the market to their competitors.

Yes, in the case of entertainment it involves turning not to competitors - not legitimate ones - but to piracy. But piracy is in a huge part symptomatic of the content producers's failure to meet demand properly. Their failure to act faster has caused their product to lose even more value.

It doesn't mean you have to ignore piracy, but it would be completely moronic not to see that many of the root causes of it, why it went from a fringe phenomenon to a mainstream one, are currently not addresses properly, and they must.

Do you really want to pay for trials, for more federal prisons, because the industry takes the wrong path in fighting piracy, especially if they end up putting people in jail but fail to much reduce the phenomenon? Do you want another "war on drugs" that cost you a fortune and has to end in sight?

They were already giving away their music for free, or rather letting it be distributed for free with their blessing. They just wanted to stop other people profiting financially from the fact they chose to let their fans trade live material for free. It's not an issue of lost revenues. It's not a market they wished to exploit or like many others they wouldn't allow recording devices at concerts. It's merely something they wanted to remain free for their fans. So yeah, it was largely a matter of making their intellectual/moral copyrights respected. That they forced people to trade the concerts via their own outlet, and ask fans to report it when they saw people doing it elsewhere to make it easier to control the free exchanges of concerts. If they overlooked the exchanges of these files elsewhere, it made it near impossible for them to actually spot people selling them instead of exchanging them, and mostly to prevent their fans not aware of the free outlet being ripped off paying for something they could get for free. They simply managed to channel most of the people who wanted their live concerts to the outlet where they could exchange them for free.

I know lots of bands that do it this way, or close. They usually believe the commercial value of taped live material too low to exploit (or other reasons let using live material as an incentive to convince people to come see them live), and they don't care fans do it but care a lot that their fans are not riped off, and don't think any money goes to the band, or that the band is endorsing this product of a quality they have no control over, and put its value at the price the pirate sell them for. This could their commercial image.

You wonder how do they stop people uploading material that puts them in a bad light (bad performance, too bad recording and so on). It's easy Joel, they ask YouTube, like is their right, to pull down these videos in such cases, and YouTube is known to comply each time. There's tons and tons more live performances on YouTube than can be found on "pirate sites" you know. That takes care of the very visible, legitimate outlets. The illegal ones, there's not much anyone can do about - in their case that would be too expensive and there's no profit to recuperate or anything. They all let it go.