Fortynine times out of fifty you'd win that bet. I generally drive the posted limit, but, when I don't - and I'm ticketed for breaking the law; I don't whine about it, or say, "but everyone does it" and try to tell the cop that the law is unpopular, restrictive, unfair and unenforcable. I understand that going faster than the posted limit has consequences and I accept that responsibility, I don't disrespect the law because the majority of offenders get away; I know that it's there for a reason.
Many people believe that a simple adjustment to speed limits would make speeding violations go away, and many fools drive as if there were no restrictions and don't care about your safety or theirs. Because they do, it doesn't make it right.
Interstate 89 passes right by where I live and I see cars ticketed for exceeding the 65 mph limit every day. Over the holidays in North Carolina I drove the 70 mph speed limit as others passed as if I was standing still. I saw that some of the "governed" don't like the 70 mph restriction either. If the limit were 90 mph some jokers will go 110 - do you want your kid's school bus sharing that road? We elect representatives to make or laws and personal problems with the laws should be addressed at the ballot box, however; laws that would rob property rights are a dangerous precident.
My only point is that some people will always push the limits, break the rules (as well as laws) and pretend that the consequences for doing so are unfair. That other individuals join in under the cover of a flury of lawbreaking is nothing more than a looting mob. We cannot change the laws everytime criminal activity surges to make the activity legal. As an empiricist, you should know all that. You should also know that downloading property as blackmail to pressue the companies to reduce prices is a foolish theory at best - the thieves are not going to suddenly start paying for something they take for free already. That's too naive for even an empiricist with no life experience (now there's an oxymoran). I prefer to live as a moral men rather than as a cynic or a thief, in the hopes that my example may someday find asylum, if not supporters in society. I believe it is wrong to speed and it's unethical to steal; no matter how many others are speeding or stealing - at this moment, previously or in the future - whether the Emperor has clothes or not.
I consider the taking of intellectural property without paying to be "stealing", no matter what others call it and no matter the consequences or lack thereof. If I am caught speeding or stealing, I will take responsibility and pay whatever penalty justice imposes, whether I like it or not because it's the price of living in this society. But, that's just me. ymmv
They are seeing a big decline in sales. They attribute it to copying. Why should we believe them? They are selling 12 songs for the same price a movie studio gets for a full-length feature film. Does your gut tell you that anything might be wrong there? These are mostly kids doing this... are there other things kids spend their money on now that they didn't before? When I was at the age when I cared who the hot bands were, there was no such thing as video games. Kids only have so much money... I'm sure video games came out of music's hide. Then there's "diversity." That splits the market up and makes it much harder for a single act to sell the kinds of numbers that once were taken for granted.
In short, there are a lot of reasons why their sales might be going down, and I'm not convinced that this Internet sharing isn't just a bogeyman to cover up some bad business judgements.
It's probably always been true that kids have a tendency to flout the law. Illegal drugs are a commonplace in their lives; we all know how we drove when we were that age... it's a wonder many of us lived. Perhaps stealing intellectual properties is just part of the youthful exuberance that goes away when responsibilities arrive.
The music business has been selling drugs-as-recreation for as long as I've been around. If the culture of doing illegal drugs paved the way for doing illegal music copying, then Karma Man is laughing his head off.
No matter what it is, you can't treat as the customers as The Enemy and expect to survive in business. They need to lose the lawyers, and find another way.
Listen Mr. Roark, RIAA has a broken and dysfunctional distribution system, and they need to fix it.
If they'd bought Napster, put the 20,000 Best Songs Of All Time on it, and charged a buck-a-song, I'd have bought an account.
Heck, they could even have developed a crypto signed MP3 player/CD writer to allow me to listen to the music and burn my own CDs.
But they have a distribution system to protect, and they are stupid.
It's that simple.
Do wedding bands or street musicians pay royalties to Michael Jackson's publishing firm ATV Music every time they play Hey Jude? Why do we tolerate that, I ask? Because the society allows us all certain latitude when observing conventions and mores. Now, I'm alarmed as anyone at the latitude allowed stop sign and red light runners nowadays and that's where I personally draw the line, but my take on the issue at hand is simply that the changes in technology are bringing about permanent changes in attitudes about the value of intellectual property.
So YOU'RE the knucklehead in the left lane !
But seriously, file sharing isn't costing record companies as much as they think. Many of the songs DLed are hits from 20 or more years ago that would be almost impossible to find in a record store. They might sell a few more through online outlets like CDNow but not many. It's just not that important to many people.
However, the press from this fight IS hurting the company's image with todays active buyers. As with the 55 law (and I remember when that started - it added 10 minutes on to my drive to campus), which changed the public's perception of law enforcement and lead to the CB craze, it is changing the image of record companies from hip to money grubbing coporate stiffs.