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It's abundantly clear that the sharers want a price of zero. All you have to do is look at their reaction to iTune. For years they'd been saying music should be available at a buck a song (even though if you go outside top 40 you'll find that many CDs are actually less than a buck a song, the American Graffiti soundtrack refered to elsewhere is a good example). iTune comes out at a buck a song. What's the reaction of the sharing community? They claim that's too much and the price should be 50 cents a song. Do you have any doubt they'd repeat the action of the price dropped to 50 cents? I don't.

These people aren't facing reality. Look at all the people on this thread desperately trying to claim copyright violation shouldn't be illegal. They have a host of reasons, all of them are bad, and it all boils down to them liking getting songs for free and not wanting to feel they're doing something bad in the process.

Actively seeking after the worst sharers and bringing them to court is a very major step to protect themselves from damage. Then there's the DMCA (much of which I don't agree with), copy protecting CDs (which has proven to be completely useless), and the various licensing chip they're pushing for (which I don't trust). They're trying, but almost everyone disagrees with at least one thing they're doing.

The technology is available but is it a viable distribution method? Will they actually make money that way? The RIAA apparently doesn't think so. We'll find out with iTunes, so far there hasn't been a noticable decrease in illegal file sharing.

Actively seeking after the worst sharers and bringing them to court is a very major step to protect themselves from damage.

Won't happen. The only ones they will get are the small fish at colleges and those on large ISPs. You forget, 90% of the uploaders are overseas, and thereby not subject to US laws or lawsuits. The sharing continues primarily due to these types of threads and stories that spread the word that this stuff is out there. Suppose you had a favorite song while growing up. Then yesterday, you hear it on the radio... it brings back great memories. Now you check on amazon and HMV only to find it is out of print. So, you can either wait until you hear it on the radio and get a tape recorder going (now, that may be a copyright violation), or look it up on iMesh and download it from some kid in Poland. Or, just sit back and maybe never hear it again. The airwaves are public domain, and no radio broadcaster I am aware of tells us, "recording anything off of this station may be a violation of the artist's copyright". So, back when I was in school, we would tape songs after we requested them, and hope the DJ wouldn't talk all over the beginning of it. Or, buy the album, if we thought the artist's hit was representative of the rest of the album. We then began to see that this was seldom the case. Call it stealing, call it copyright infringement, whatever... it exists and it is not going away.

What's the reaction of the sharing community?

There is no "sharing community." There are apparently tens of millions of individuals who are active users of these Kazaa-type things. As the price drops from $17 toward zero, we would expect to see a bell-shaped curve describing how many people so far have dropped off Kazaa and moved to a paying service. Somewhere on that curve is the profit-maximizing price. It's not zero, and it's not $17. I don't know where it is. Thievery has not gone to zero at that point, but we don't care: it's the profit-maximizing price, whatever it turns out to be.

The declaration of a class "File Sharers" who have the property "they steal things" and the creation of an imaginary 'sharing community' are both rhetorical devices that group huge numbers of people for the purpose of demonizing them. There is no 'community' that acts in concert, and ascribing a generalized propensity to steal to users of file-sharing programs has a high probability of being a false assertion.

I don't follow this stuff in detail, but I had the impression that iTunes was still Apple-only. We can't tell anything about how that model will affect the entire industry if only ~10% of the people can even get on it. Didn't I read that they've already sold several million songs? It's not like there's no file-sharing software for Apple, so obviously a significant number of people are choosing to pay for something they could get for free. I would expect that; my underlying belief is that most people would prefer to be honest. (Another underlying belief is that people who assume that everyone is a thief are themselves thieves.)

A buck per song still equals the inflated price of a CD and unless the selection is actually good (my music is not very popular), I am not going to pay money for that.

Sorry, but 50 cents is the way to go, as you could get the equivalent of one CD for the good deal of five dollars, which is what a CD should cost.

As for your claim that if you go outside the top 40 you can find music for less than a buck a song, you are out of your mind. Almost everything I download is not popular music in the top 40 and not even on the major charts as it is religious music. I go into a store and find Cd prices at 15-17 dollars. I go to Wal-Mart and the prices are around 12-14. I go online and the prices are similar to Wal-Mart. Except for some old CD's and a few new ones every once in awhile as a special sale at one website that likes to have ridiculously low prices for selected CD's occassionally, I have NOT located anything I am interested in for below $11. And the times I find something I want on that site at the sale price is rare.

The thing is, CD prices do not change. You can find a CD from 10 years ago and it still will cost you 12 bucks, (with a few exceptions like the clearance sale that one site does I mentioned above).

I have been to Wal-Mart and seen releases of CD's from 5 years ago and the price has only dropped from the 14 bucks when it was knew to the bottom the store will go with almost any CD no matter how old, the 12 dollar range.

You are the one not facing reality about the cost of CD's.

Almost everything except CD's gets cheaper as they age.