I always like these debates, being a musician and all. Here's my view on it...
There is no actual theft. If the artist had an orange, and I took that orange away to eat it, I would be stealing. If I was to clone this orange so I'd have one for me too, there is no theft. Now.... If the artist was selling that orange and I took it away, I would be stealing. If I cloned it for free then the artist would miss a sale, but would I be stealing? He still has his orange for all I know, and the possibility of a sale remains the same.
This problem is inherant to the art. Music, like film, is insubstantial. It does not really exist in any concrete form. For practical use, we imprint this insubstantial stuff to a physical medium. And because this world is twisted and human beings suck, we give the art piece's the value of it's physical entity, we associate the two. Two things that, really, have nothing to do with each other. You don't see this with let's say paintings. There's a godzillion places that sell reproductions of this or that famous painting and it's perfectly legal because....it's a copy. Of course if you were to use it in a museum and charge people telling them it's the real one, you would be an asshole and a liar, but it has nothing to do with the current problem
With music and video, even the first copy is...well...a copy. There is absolutely no artistic value added to the material because it is put on this kind of tape or cd or what have you. We just naturally choose some because of their cost, easy of use, portability and other criterias like that, but that still doesn't make the medium part of the piece. So imposing surtaxes on media is pretty lame if you ask me, it just limits the ease of distribution necessary to the artists.
The other part of the problem is that people don't read anagrams properly. RIAA.... Recording Industry Association of America. The word artist is not in there so complaining that the artist makes only 3 cents per copy sold is not exactly a valid argument. The artist chooses to make a deal, he knows all the details. If it's a major label, there'll even be plenty of lawyers around to explain every bit of the contract. It's the *recording industry* we're talking about. Artists have more and more ways to release their music without the use of a label. There has been independent recording artists ever since mixing boards were small enough to take home, and that's like the 60s.
The industry has always fought with a passion against change in their business. Tapes, vinyls, cds, mp3s....you name it, they hated it at first and then embraced years too late, effectively slowing down the course of audio evolution. Computers, are another thing they refused to acknowledge until mp3s bit them in the ass. And they still haven't caught up with the *vast* possibility of business for music online. But the artists have. Many many sites opened offering artists to sell their music directly off the web. Many artists opened sites of their own, some of them very successful.
The often cited argument that sales are lost is only semi valid as these are nothing but projected sales. There's a lot of stuff I have downloaded I would *never* have bought. Some of these resulted in me becoming a fan, maybe going to see the band live when they drop in Montreal, effectively giving them a lot more money than whatever the industry feels it has lost. Other downloads have resulted in shift-deleting this out of existence on my computer and never hear that crap again.
If you want to run with a major, be overproduced in a 80 billion dollar studio and appear on star shows on the american network and have sex with coked up skinny dumb 19 years old blonde supermodels, well... you gotta pay the price. There is absolutely no need for an artist to go with a major. But if you want the multimillionaire lifestyle and big concerts in stadiums there's huge amounts of money that you don't have that need to be invested in making your pathetic attempt at stardom a little more probable.
DRM...It's pure raw untreated all-natural BS. You won't be able to copy media to anything not approved by whatever DRM module you're stuck with depending on the OS you have. It is very... *very* dangerous to have an OS that can lock out access to a media file. Production studios would not be able to make the OS switch without significant patching or straight out removal of the DRM module. "Yeah.. Boss? How would ya feel about losing 20 millions right now? Cause this {bleep}ing computer didn't recognize the signature properly for the original audio files for the next [insert big shot here] album." Guy gets fired. Computer gets thrown out window. Boss becomes a transvestite clown. And it starts raining blood.
