Giving stuff away can be a fabulous way to garner publicity, and people have every right to do it. I'm just saying that if everything is free and always free, a

Giving stuff away can be a fabulous way to garner publicity, and people have every right to do it. I'm just saying that if everything is free and always free, art becomes nothing more than a hobby. The trouble with that is that great art takes a lot of time to produce. If it involves more than one person, which means pretty much any film and most recorded music, then it also costs money or many peoples' time. So if people cannot make a living off it, then they cannot dedicate that time. You will not have any great art. One irony of all this is that pirates often talk about how they're sticking up for the little guy and sticking it to the big multi-millionaire artists. But that's not how it works. The little guy -- the indy band, the small film studio -- is part of the long tail. When you subtract across the board, the long tail gets hit harder as a percentage of its total income than the big guys. Edit: realized that the reason the MPAA are the most insane about this is probably because major movies are really big-ticket investments. The risk is a lot larger, and to more people. To add even more irony, books are among the least pirated things and Kindle is one of the most successful for-pay art markets on the 'net. Yet books cost less to produce than recorded music and much less than movies. Go figure. Even weirder, Kindle uses DRM and yet nobody seems to care.