said by maartena:..that it is virtually unstoppable. RIAA and others can make it harder, but you can never root it out. Sure, I'll admit I used to download MP3's left and right as well when I was younger. This was before the P2P revolution, and everyone in my town (which was one of the first to get cablemodems in 1996) had their own FTP server to which we would log on.
I easily had 30, 40 FTP servers in my client of neighbors, friends, colleagues, etc.... we would just log on to one and see what they had. Upload was no more then 128 kbit/s, so it would take time. Overnight most of the times as sometimes 2 or 3 people were logged on. But it worked just fine.
From a technical point of view, it's actually better and more bandwidth-efficient for people to use P2P as opposed to their own little FTP servers.
With encrypted P2P just over the horizon, and P2P "friends networks" being established which are going to be hard to be infiltrated by RIAA, piracy is pretty much unstoppable.
And with the economy as it is, and people still wanting their music, it's going to be used more then ever.
There is only one solution: The big CEO's of record companies need to pull their million dollar bonuses and profits out of their collective asses, and provide music that is cheaper to purchase, AND without DRM.
I would not mind buying a set of MP3's if I also am allowed to put these MP3's on my Media Center computer, AND my iPod, AND burn them to a MP3 CD for my car stereo without being penalized for it.
DRM I think is one of the main reasons why people get their MP3's from "free" sources, as they know that this MP3 will play in pretty much every device that is capable of it, without having to verify its digital authenticity.
DRM free music is available legally at many web sites online now. So what will be the excuse when pirating still goes on anyway?
