If we stop thinking of this as a moral issue (stealing music is bad) and more as a business issue (how can I make money making music?) the issue becomes clearer. In my opinion, the laws of copyright were designed to facilitate commerce and are not 'self-evident' in the way human rights are.
If I was in the music industry, my line of reasoning would be thus
1. Can I prevent people from downloading my stuff illegally? (My guess is this very unlikely regardless of lawsuits, drm, etc)
2. Given that some people WILL obtain my goods without having paid for it, how can I still make money from the cheap bastards? (My guess is this will probably involve using assets that I can exert monopoly control to access e.g. live interactions, licensing, early access to stuff, etc)
3. How can I ensure the folks who would still pay for my goods are not tempted to defect and join the pirates? Here's where you make sure your distribution strategy is much better than the pirate experience (It probably wouldn't hurt to help to make the pirate experience suck a little bit by seeding torrents with crappy versions of your goods and hampering companies who want to improve the pirate experience).
I would probably focus more on the 2nd step simply because the 1st and 3rd are just band-aids and can only take you so far. This point of view probably pisses some people off but like everything else, it's not personal, just business
If I was in the music industry, my line of reasoning would be thus
1. Can I prevent people from downloading my stuff illegally? (My guess is this very unlikely regardless of lawsuits, drm, etc)
2. Given that some people WILL obtain my goods without having paid for it, how can I still make money from the cheap bastards? (My guess is this will probably involve using assets that I can exert monopoly control to access e.g. live interactions, licensing, early access to stuff, etc)
3. How can I ensure the folks who would still pay for my goods are not tempted to defect and join the pirates? Here's where you make sure your distribution strategy is much better than the pirate experience (It probably wouldn't hurt to help to make the pirate experience suck a little bit by seeding torrents with crappy versions of your goods and hampering companies who want to improve the pirate experience).
I would probably focus more on the 2nd step simply because the 1st and 3rd are just band-aids and can only take you so far. This point of view probably pisses some people off but like everything else, it's not personal, just business