said by Jimmy1234 :

Authors of great books and educational reference have been getting ripped off since the beginning of time.

Schools re-use textbooks for years, we have public places called libraries that we build and maintain with public funds which are essentially a form of file trading, they are just not digital.

We need to tear down our public libraries and dispose of their books before we need to worry about music and software. Schools need to buys books every year for their pupils, pupils should not be sharing the efforts of this countries finest educators and their literary creations.

Books and writings have been around and have been illegally traded for much longer that music and software (ie. The Holy Bible.)

Once all of the public libraries are torn down, and we get rid of those pirate librarians, then we can worry about what to do about music and software file sharing.

First things first.

Jimmy1234

said by JasonD :

Who comes up with this trash? File trading is more akin to anarchy, NOT Democracy. And file trading should be illegal. Now before somebody hoots and hollers about open source or the latest wow patch, there are exceptions. But until people stop stealing there needs to be a controlled and centralized non-p2p method to grant those who receive permission to use copyrighted content access to it, without them then exposing it to the world. Sure it sucks, but until peoples morals improve, it's what we're looking at.

We live in a permission based culture. And the laws around it protect all of us, not just media companies. If you create something of value, you have the protection of the law to keep somebody from stealing it. You can, of course, choose to share it with anyone, but the law gives that control to you. Not some pirate.

said by grandpinaple :

The founding fathers originally put IP in because they were trying to protect books and the references were mostly to patents.