failure to respond to this type of situation will lead the music/movie industry to believe that they have won this round of the battle and embolden them to go this direction again at will.
So, the argument is that people should just continue to take this content free of charge from the web, or via whatever method they currently use?
No different for the idea that eBooks should need to be repurchased by libraries every 25 loans
I have not heard this argument nor do I understand it either. It's just like video rentals, the store purchases, and can rent till the disc is damaged, stolen or not wanted.
Lets look at new releases of eBooks for example.....Hardback book $20 - $25, paperback $8 - $15, eBook about $1 less than the printed book....there is no excuse for this practice considering the cost savings for not printing it or shipping it, but it is getting worse all the time.....just check on books that you would like to read and you will see this trend accelerating.
With respect to ebooks, you still have to pay the author, you still have to pay the editor, you still have to have legal representation..thus there are still significant costs to ebooks. For me personally, I buy ebooks and it's the convenience of having to not store physical copies and being able to carry dozens, hundreds or thousands of books on my Kindle wherever I go. Also, with multiple Kindles on my account, we can have multiple family members reading the same book if we want, without having to purchase physical copies.
This viewpoint that all bittorrenting is bad is way off.
Nobody said all bit torrenting was bad. As you stated, Linux distros and such are almost always downloaded via torrents. it's the best way to go. But to try to pretend that torrenting is not used as a mechanism for mass piracy is just plain silly. It's very heavily used to transfer and distributed content that otherwise costs people money and that's the problem.
I had my ISP throttle my bandwit before... and i really don't want to be affected by this again just because the industries are so paranoid.
I don't want to be throttled either. But it's the people who horde and pirate all of this content that are really to blame. I'm not sure how you can call the industries paranoid, obviously they want to make money. Why should some people be able to so easily just take this content without paying anything for it? If you don't feel a movie or music is worth the price, just skip it. Taking it for free, is not a reasonable solution.
The only thing you can do is to make the product cheap enough so Piracy isn't really worth the hassle.
I don't think there is a cheap enough price point? CD's used to be over $20, now they are about 1/2 that price, but piracy is still a problem. Music tracks can be had for $0.99 at iTunes, but yet people still download some of this music from free sites because they would rather save $1. Who wants to spend any amount of money if getting it free is so easy. That's the whole point of measures such as these, make the process more difficult and troublesome so that people get irritated with the process and instead simply buy the content.
I know plenty of people who have downloaded music from a "site" -- and then decide they want the original CD quality so they have actually BOUGHT the music -- They would never have heard of it otherwise !!
That's the classic argument. But I think I know more people who downloaded music for free and simply listened for free forever because they didn't see a point in buying.
Look how much money Hollywood etc made last year alone. This year they are producing so much RUBBISH I doubt if Piracy will be a problem in any case this year whatever the laws passed.
how are they going to stop people from renting a dvd from redbox for a 1$ and making a copy of it?
The way I look at that scenario is that RedBox bought that movie. And you paid the $1.xx to rent the movie. Making a copy of your own and giving it to friends or putting it into your collection so you never again have to rent it or buy it, is taking advantage of the system. However, I think downloading it outright without going through Redbox or a rental store is worse as you really are taking it for nothing.