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Message: [QUOTE="robwbright, post: 1309511, member: 60515"] That's about the gist of how they've prosecuted the cases that I've seen. I think the whole thing is pretty ridiculous. The MOMENT the recording industry went digital, they lost control of their product. It is likely that they will NEVER find a way to copy protect it in a way that can't be broken. They should have come up with the pay by the month file sharing services YEARS ago, but they wanted to keep making money the old way. Resistance to change in the digital age is a sure way to find yourself quickly obsolete. Of course, Radiohead gave away their most recent album and still made a large amount of money off of it. In fact, Radiohead probably made more. On your typical $15 CD, the artist gets about $1.00. The local retail store gets about $3-$4. The artist makes most of their money on concerts and t-shirts. Do you think the artists are going to complain about increased exposure thru file sharing? They won't complain too hard at only $1.00 per CD in profit. File sharing likely gets more people at their concerts and thus increases their profits. How much do you think the RIAA is getting on each of those $15.00 CDs? However, Radiohead's giveaway was a download of the complete album off the internet. The band asked for a donation - if you wanted to. If you didn't want to, you could literally have it for free - you just had to give the band your contact info so they could market to you in the future. The average "donation" was $6.00. The ONLY overhead was server space. So lets see - they could make $1.00 per CD by selling it thru a record company, or they could make $6.00 per CD (minus server space). Which way makes more sense? The industry threatens people with $100,000 fine per song shared, then settles for several thousand dollars. I know of only two cases where people actually fought until trial - and one of them won the case. The attorney fees for the recording industry are running into the tens of thousands of dollars per case. It makes no financial sense at all to prosecute these cases. Metallica ticked me off when they went against file sharing - they admitted that they used to copy their records and tapes and share them with friends. What's the difference? The only difference is the number of people giving/getting the file and the distance between the "friends". Finally, a $500,000 judgment against a person making $30,000 a year is worthless - you'll never collect it - probably never collect any of it. All the recording industry does in those cases is try to prove a point and scare people. And BTW, I've got three friends in a band. They cover everything from Skynyrd to Alice in Chains to Avenged Sevenfold to a cool hard rock version of "Brown Eyed Girl". They also do originals (after the bar crowd is drunk). The band is better than some bands I've heard on Leno and Letterman. Yet, they don't have a contract. As they develop, I expect the internet and file sharing will make them some money. There aren't any record execs in the West Virginia/Ohio River Valley. [/QUOTE]

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