JSWolf, I honestly think if the discussion was actually focused on *revenue* as opposed to moralism, a lot more people would be getting paid
It never seems to be about getting paid...it always more about someone "getting something for nothing" when what they get, at least electronically, is "virtually nothing" in the first place.
My wife gave me a perfect example. She is a (sigh) huge Prince fan. So huge that she had me get a friend in the UK send that Prince CD that came in the newspaper...fan.
Now she could have downloaded every single track off the thing on the internet.
She chose not to...but for the (in the framework of this discussion) "wrong reasons".
We'll come back to that in a second.
She has a 20-Disc set of some Prince thing. I don't know what it is, just that it is 20 discs. She likely has every song on it on other records. But this 20 disc set is the hightlight of her collection. It is very rare, it seems, and if sold would fetch quite a bit of money.
If she ripped every song off of the collection and put it on a DVD...what do you think that is worth..to anyone?
She didn't download the songs off that prince cd because the cd was worth possessing in and of a thing itself...even tho the cd is simply chemicals and plastic. She could have had and enjoyed the music days before it got here from the UK...because all a CD is is chemicals and plastic, you see, but it was the thing she wanted.
This...dichotomy just seems to escape people. "No one wants a book without words! It would just be blank pages!" they cry. So true. The thing is...
No one wants words without a book that much, either. At least with a book of blank pages, you can put your own words in, or give it to someone to put words in, or pull out the pages and do origami, or make paper planes...or have kindling.
Eh?