The MPAA, RIAA and other entertainment industry groups want people to believe that piracy is the result of people’s greed and refusal to pay. A recent experiment by Wolfire Games sheds another light on this argument, as they found out that even a penny can be too much.
Once again the music industry has come out with disappointing results for physical music sales, which they blame entirely on file-sharing. What they failed to mention though, is that their findings show that music pirates are buying more digital music than the average music consumer. Since digital music is the future, pirates are the industry’s most valuable customers.
A survey conducted by the New Zealand based research firm UMR Research found that nearly half of the respondents think that it’s morally okay to watch porn on the Internet. Downloading music and movies illegally, on the other hand, is frowned upon by an overwhelming majority of the respondents.
The Delhi High Court has fined Microsoft for harassing alleged software pirates by taking them to court in the national capitol, instead of the cities where the crimes had supposedly occurred. According to the ruling, using money as a power tool is not condoned without repercussions.
While the major record labels were dragging file-sharers and BitTorrent sites to court for copyright infringement, they were themselves being sued by a conglomerate of artists for exactly the same offenses. Warner, Sony BMG, EMI and Universal face up to $6 billion in damages for pirating a massive 300,000 tracks.
