Stepping outside of this particular lawsuit for a moment, I just wanted to comment on how I see the situation as a whole. Looking back on the past 12 years or so, I think what we've seen is an unfiltered example of the "real" consumer market.
The truth is that people wanted music and movies. They wanted them in a big way! But the cost of purchasing music and movies always stood between consumers and the actual number of songs and movies that they wanted. With prices in place, people were forced to prioritize the songs and movies that they wanted most and were almost always forced into having far fewer songs and movies than they actually wanted.
When file-sharing and free downloads were at their peak, we saw just how ravenous the consumer market really is. With songs and movies available for free, people downloaded anything in which they were even remotely interested. A great deal of what was downloaded was very likely only listened to or viewed once - and very likely not even completely from beginning to end. In essence, people were sampling. The songs and movies that they liked most found a semi-permanent place in people's collections. A great deal of content was deleted after having been sampled and rejected.
The question though, really, is: what is fair? Consumers were, in a fairly real sense, being deprived of what they wanted. Restricted by what they could afford and left with a debt if they were unfortunate enough to pay for something that they ultimately did not like. However, obviously it cost money (a lot of money) to create and produce those songs and movies. Obviously, the artists and everyone involved ought to be compensated for their work. It is completely unfair to expect anyone to create something - at a cost to them - and then give it away for free. If they willingly do so, that is an act of great generosity, but it is completely unfair to outright expect it.
On the other side of the coin though, it is unfair to withhold something that was created for consumption unless the person who wants it is willing to pay a price greater than what that something is worth. THAT is the real crux of the matter. It is obvious to me that there is rather wide-spread agreement that the pricing of music and movies is above what we, the consumers, deem them to be worth. We come to this judgement based on anecdotal evidence; we see fruits of the enormous profits generated from music and movies and draw the obvious conclusion that the cost of producing the goods is FAR less than the price at which the goods are being sold.
Angered by this view, consumers retaliate. Presented with the opportunity, consumers steal music and movies because in essence, consumers feel that they have been over-charged (grossly) in the past. Stealing is a means of restoring a perceived balance. The exaggerated profits from the past can be used to offset the losses of recently stolen goods - or so the emotional argument goes.
The truth of the matter is that what consumers really want are fair prices. Consumers will pay what they think something is worth and they want to see evidence after the fact that the price they were charged was, in fact, commiserate with covering the cost of production plus a reasonable profit. When the evidence suggests that the profit was unreasonably high, I believe that consumers are in the right to feel cheated and angry and to seek a means of restoring fairness.
A so-called "free market" and so-called "competition" are not enough when all parties are essentially fixing the price to be equal among them. Consumers are retaliating against a long history of prices having been fixed at an unreasonably high level. The greed of the music and movie industries is strongly evidenced by the gaudy displays of lavish opulence by those who run and star in these industries. The internet merely gave consumers a means by which they could demonstrate their anger and rectify the perceived imbalance.
Here, the RIAA seeks to dismantle that means, punish those who have used it and protect the greed and imbalance of the previous system. But the simple fact is that consumers have now been empowered and as history always shows, when the masses rise up and realize that they are many while those in power are few, the result is always the same: revolution!
TerrorBeast
