This made me think of a quote which turns out to be from a Clay Shirky essay (http://www.shirky.com/writings/riaa_encryption.html)

"It may be time to dust off that old issue of Wired, because the RIAA is succeeding where 10 years of hectoring by the Cypherpunks failed. [...] Note that the broadening adoption of encryption is not because users have become libertarians, but because they have become criminals; to a first approximation, every PC owner under the age of 35 is now a felon."

On the other side of the ledger we find this famous quote from Tim O'Reilly:

> Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.

http://openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2002/12/11/piracy.html

Yeah. I've never seen any solid stats, and I hate using my gut as an information source, but my gut tells me that piracy has been a much larger help to artists. I've seen a few news articles that imply it. Piracy is a threat to labels, but really, when a musician can grab Garage Band and a few thousand bucks of hardware and publish his own music... do we need labels?

What I find amusing is this argument I've heard a few times coming from the labels that goes along the lines of that we need their expertise in order to produce and discern the "quality" music... Because they do such a good job of that usually.

From what I've seen, that's how sharing has been going since the extortion/lawsuit campaign started.

The average person doesn't hit TPB. They ask their friends. On the edges of the graph people are downloading, but it's a small minority of the actual sharing going on.

It's also much easier to find the songs on google. And if you're more dedicated, ripping the audio from YouTube.

See http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/07/harry-potter-and-digita... and search for "Recorder Identification Code". I don't know if there's a way to subvert this.