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Sorry but whinging about piracy is like king kanute trying to command the tide. It's always going to happen and it's technologically impossible to prevent, the failure of schemes like DRM and CSS dvd encryption make this perfectly clear. Nobody sells betamax videos anymore, because nobody wants betamax videos or has betamax players. You don't see betamax manufacturers moaning about it, they've adapted and moved on. Anyone still in the market of investing in the production and retail of betamax video tapes in 2008 would be branded a lunatic, and probably locked up if they started bringing lawsuits against people for using VHS and suing people for lost revenue, just because reality no longer fits their obselete business model. This is exactly the situation the music industry is in today. Lots of people no longer consider music to be worth what the industry says it "should" be worth. Lots of people are no longer awed by slick marketing and huge publicity campaigns, letalone the cult of personality that drove the whole thing during the 80's and 90's for example (think michael jackson etc). Lots of people can get music for nothing without even leaving their house and they are happy to do so, and will continue to do so. Is the answer to bring lawsuits against these millions of people for simply doing what is in their own interest rather than what's in the interest of an industry widely regarded as corrupt, bloated, shallow and detrimental to the artform? No, the answer is to admit the business model is dead and adapt. In the free market businesses don't have a right to make profits, the public however have a right to act of their own free will. The customer is always right, and the customer has had enough of paying through the nose for something they don't feel is worth what's being charged, so they've gone somewhere else where it's cheaper and easier to obtain.

You can't say anyone is out of pocket, because they are presuming people are willing to pay for the stuff in the first place. Which they clearly aren't. You can't say "oh but I would have made x amount if nobody had downloaded the tunes". You can't say that anyone who has downloaded the tunes would have paid for them otherwise. It's revenue that *doesn't exist*. As I pointed out earlier, illegal downloading is a fact of life, it's there, deal with it, work around it, don't go slapping civil law suits on kids for downloading the latest coldplay album.