[FastNBulbous]

...to compare P2P sharing to this kind of piracy is what got everyone annoyed at the RIAA.

But the result is often the same (author/record label isn't credited with a sale). So if you don't want to call it piracy, fine. But you can't pretend that it's impossible for P2P "sharing" to have an adverse economic effect on authors in much the same way that counterfeiting does.

[weegee]

You are permitted to home tape a tv program (Supreme Court ruling for Sony Betamax and against Hollywood). I would believe the same to be true of radio content and cassettes.

So someone can obtain songs without paying the artists although as we enter the digital realm for recording video and audio the industry is leaning on technology manufacturers to bar the recording of certain signals (including broadcast). Digital Copyright Millenium Act prohibits architecting schemes around those erected barriers even though the Supreme Court ruled such taping to be fair use.

The industry is getting to write the laws that govern us.

[eno_]

So if you don't want to call it piracy, fine. But you can't pretend that it's impossible for P2P "sharing" to have an adverse economic effect on authors in much the same way that counterfeiting does.

That is, at least, debatable: If you compare the "cost" of P2P with the cost of conventional marketing - i.e. payola, which is now done at arms-length through promotional consultants - the cost to the creator of a work may work out to be similar. Whereas piracy is incontrovertably stealing.

Intellectual property laws were authorized by our Constitution for the purpose of making the public domain richer in the long term at the cost of allowing government to make laws making authors richer in the short term. Nowhere does it say anything about protecting record labels, publishers, etc.