iroxursoxoff
I think you are right. These people are trying to control our personal lives. What's the big deal with the piracy thing. One person buys a cd and all his/her friends instantly get all the songs. that's the same thing right. So What if more people start trading?
Actually, it's not about control of personal lives; that's just a side effect. It's about trying to
recapture control of information (and revenue) flow that they themselves gave up. To use music as a specific example, since it's the most common:
Most people think of the radio this way: ads are ads, and songs are the content. This is actually wrong: songs are also ads, which is why you tend to hear the same set of songs on many stations even if they have no-repeat day policies, and
don't tend to hear full albums for most artists. It does happen once in a while, typically in the context of a station playing the artist's full discography, if not the station's, in some special event. The songs, ultimately, are intended to sell the albums. This is why they got peeved at the existence of mixtapes and suchlike.
It used to be the case that you could go to sites still considered legitimate today (such as cnet, download, go, and AOL and its foreign mirrors) and not only download music, but comparison-"shop" download clients based on ease of obtaining the hot artists of the day. Even now, they operate official Youtube channels as well as the VEVO group. All of this makes sense in light of the idea that songs will sell albums.
It hasn't worked. It's not that people don't want to buy - consider iTunes, and consider artists that sell their own music online. It's that the industry tends to push out product that resembles chicken nuggets more than gold nuggets. Instead of improving their methods and/or re-evaluating how they use the technology, they attack the technology.
That was COICA, and is SOPA, PROTECT IP (aka PIPA,) and ACTA: the industries trying to use the law to compensate for their own failures.
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