The Morality of File Sharing Excellent article which discussing the current zeitgeist around Morality & File Sharing, and I couldn't agree more...

http://torrentfreak.com/piracy-morals-and-the-need-for-change-071323/

The industry keeps trying to advertise that what people who download are doing is STEALING. It's not STEALING... STEALING is when you take something from someone so they don't have it anymore.

If someone steals my car, I don't have a car anymore, I can't get around, they've taken something from me.

If I download a song, I'm not taking that song away from anyone. People might argue that I'm taking money away from the record label, but I wouldn't have bought 95% of the music that I download anyway... If the labels would embrace the technology embrace the cost savings of electronic distribution and pass that on to the customers, great! But as long as they expect me to pay 99 cents a song, they can go screw themselves...

One interesting point made in the article is the 160gb iPod... Have you considered how much it would cost to fill that with legitimately purchased songs? I did a quick calculation, let's say you put 3mb songs on there - I know that's small, but let's say they're not the best possible quality, the 160GB would store 53,000 songs, at 99cents each (which is reasonable if you say an average album is $15 and contains around that many songs... So it would be like $53,000 to fill the iPod with music... That's hillarious...  ¶ 12:01 PM