Congress has repeatedly increased penalties for copyright infringement because those who create are entitled to the fruits of their labor. It is not just downloaded music in question. Every kind of copyrighted material is being shared without payment due to Internet use.
An argument to ignore infringement of copyrights just because a lot of people are doing it is wrong on many levels.
People who create and produce original works have a right to be paid for their work.
If the penalties for copyright infringement are kept low, those who infringe will laugh, ignore the potential cost of being caught and continue stealing the creativity of others.
We cannot raise a generation of young people who devalue intellectual property to zero. Such a course threatens anyone with new ideas who spends years trying to develop ideas into property of value.
If copyrights can be infringed with impunity, why not patents?
The concept of protection of intellectual property is vital to society.
This is why virtually all developed countries have strong laws prohibiting infringement of intellectual property.
We will all lose by devaluation of creativity.
If the world is free to steal your creation, why create and share it at all? Why bother?
There is a way to legally obtain music off the Internet.
I use iTunes all the time and am thrilled to only pay 99 cents per song for any of millions of songs available to me.
My anger about this judgment is not the "guilty" part, since she's obviously guilty as hell. It's that $80,000 per song is so ridiculous. It would have made more sense to stick with the $3-4K/song typical award. That's still a crushing fine for someone in her shoes, but it's in line with precedent.
> I use iTunes all the time and am thrilled to only pay 99 cents per song for any of millions of songs available to me.
I find most of what I want on eMusic.com, and pay $12/month for 50 tracks -- about a quarter a song, regardless of length. But that's mostly classical/jazz/blues/indie stuff, not pop. If I wanted pop I'd be on iTunes, or one of the other pop services.
IMO it's a shame (and their own fault) that the CD companies didn't get this new model working for them a decade ago -- we all could have avoided this hassle.