Downloading Music/films illegally? You could be cut off

Explain please.

F*ck them. It's just laws to keep a stupid, old, corrupt, greedy and unadapting music industry in business.

Yes, artists should get money for their music. But guess what - artists get a lot of money from gigs, the sale of merchandise.

Yes, the process of recording the music costs money, the process of getting it onto a CD and then distributing and advertising it costs money. But not that much.

In this world of digital downloads, however, how much does it really cost to get an album from one side of the earth to the other? Practically nothing. Even a CD-quality album, encoded in FLAC rather than MP3, costs a fraction of a penny to send across the globe. And they charge us £10 to download an album that isn't even a quarter of the average bitrate of FLAC.

Laws like this exist for one purpose. That is not to keep the artists going, it is to keep the record labels going. The greedy multinationals. The corporations who refuse to adapt to change.

Sharing is not wrong. Ripping people off is wrong. Exploiting artists is wrong.

The music industry has been using the whole "IT CHEATS ARTISTS OUT OF MONEY" BS for a long time. If you really want to help out an artist, go to their concert. The shares from the concert go directly to them, not some conglomerate industry that owns their songs and enslaves them to 2-6 year contracts.

What also is funny is that they say "Music and film companies say that the illegal downloads cost them millions of pounds in lost revenues". Really? That's interesting, because I don't know how they'd be able to calculate how much money they truly lose from illegal downloading.

The music industry will not be around for very long. Think about it. Artists are now able to make good quality music without the assistance of a label and they have means to distribute it online through iTunes and various stores. It's really the beginning of the death of the music industry here. All we can hope for is that the government doesn't decide that ISPs need to police the internet on the music industry's behalf.

Exactly. And I know a lot of people enjoy buying merchandise from artists. It seems like the only artists who are going along with this stupid idea about "WE'RE LOSING MONEY!!" are the ones who are losing money because their music is starting to suck.

I find it especially interesting that they try to sue people for thousands of dollars per song yet the amount of money they would have received if someone had actually paid would be in the region of about 70 cents. Take Jammie Thomas - she was made to pay $9250 per song for 24 songs, for a total of $222,000. If she had actually paid, the record labels would have got $16.80. There's quite a difference there.

A lot of their revenue is lost in the paying of bloody lawyers.

This is a simple violation of a person's freedoms, rights, and liberties. Throughout history governments of countries have slowly gone from absolutist rulers and autocracies to a free country with individual rights for everyone, and representation. That is the best accomplishment of history in my opinion.

Now, governments are taking a step in the reverse. They are pulling measures that they use to intervene in our personal lives to destroy the liberties and freedoms our forefathers installed. The leaders today are trying to instill as much power to themselves as possible for their own greedy use.

For example, and this is in my own opinion, global warming. I do not believe global warming is mostly caused by humans. Maybe some, but I believe most of it is caused by natural processes of the earth. Yet the government is manipulating statistics into tricking us into believing that we are causing global warming, and they are using it to centralize their own power to control our lives.

But hey, what do I know? I am a 17 year old teenager who can't really back his opinion with scientific evidence and proof.