Bullshit. Copyright has a lot of problems and the lawsuits aren't doing anything, no matter HOW you decide who to sue. Professional copyright infringement (e.

Bullshit. Copyright has a lot of problems and the lawsuits aren't doing anything, no matter HOW you decide who to sue. Professional copyright infringement (e.g. companies using pirated software) is easy to spot and easy to persecute. It's also a serious issue because you're really talking about lost sales here, not just hypothetical sales. Private copyright infringement (e.g. mom downloading some MP3s) is hard to spot and even harder to persecute. You can't talk about lost sales because the amount pirated is in no relation to the amount that could have been sold -- if you've got a 80/20 distribution between pirated and sold, it's absurd to claim 80% lost sales. If you're talking about real profit losses for the actual producer (i.e. the artist, developer or whatever), private copyright infringement is negligible. In fact, the low cost of private copyright infringement could be soothed even more if the producers would allow for easy ways of donation (PayPal, whatever): in many cases the "lost sales" were lost because the would-be-customer wouldn't have paid the amount asked or was simply not willing to take the risk of paying for something before knowing they like it. Whether you like it or not, private copyright infringement is here to stay (and has been here ever since the invention of copyright law). You can't stop it. You only have the choice between accepting it as a fact of life and trying to work with it (viral marketing, commercial support for Free software, live concerts, etc etc), or ignoring the social costs of your actions and trying to punish all the "evildoers" one-by-one making examples of the students and grandmas you actually manage to draw into courtrooms. Publishing companies are not going to die over this, but their role will deflate back into what it had been before the record industry / Hollywood boom: as a service provider to the real artists, offering to do the marketing for them, arrange concerts and publish their work in physical form. It's only natural for RIAA and MPAA to try and tear down civil rights in their dying throes, but that doesn't make it any more ethical, no matter what the legal situation says (which they have nicely shaped according to their interests in the past, I might add). Vive la révolution!