I suspect that were this entire enterprise not underpinned and compelled by the greatest industrial looting in business history, it might be regarded differently. As it is, the pirates have little to blame but themselves. Stop buying and an industry fades.

Yes, this is true. If you stop buying from an industry, it goes away. However, there are two important points obscured by your rhetoric.

1) Just what industry are you talking about? You want us to assume that the “music industry” is the one fading. This is incorrect, as people are spending *more* money on music than ever before. The music industry is doing great, and is as healthy and vital as ever. The industry that is fading is the recording industry, that is, the industry of making and selling plastic discs.

2) Industries fading is a natural part of the business cycle. To pull out an old saw, the buggy whip industry isn’t exactly an international powerhouse these days. Why? Because people stopped buying! And so it faded away. Industries must justify their existence by making things that consumers want to buy; they don’t get a free pass that states that they must survive, unless they are truly a national necessity that would harm our economy to be without. You’d need a mighty convincing argument to make anyone believe that pressing plastic disks with patterns that correspond to music and movies is an industry of national importance.

Instead, they are 1) hurting artists far worse than any industry ever did, 2) creating the climate wherein the laws will virtually institutionalize these industries and worst of all 3) setting the stage for future ISP taxes that will cycle back to the industries, removing all risk and any future need for investment or innovation.

1) Please, justify this statement. Mike gives examples all the time of artists both big and small who are prospering under the new regime of digital sharing. Your statement is a bald-faced lie, and you should be ashamed of yourself for uttering it.

2 & 3) You almost sound like you believe if everyone just followed the law and acted like good little citizens, the industries would wither away on their own. I’m sorry, but “Sit down and shut up, ’cause I know what’s good for you” has never resulted in anything good for the people on the receiving end.

The copyright industry (that is, the RIAA, MPAA, and related) aren’t a bunch of charitable folks that want everyone to just get along. They are not just ‘reacting’ to the infringers. They are trying their very best to not only protect the status quo, but change it to benefit them further. They are trying to eliminate Fair Use. They already act like it doesn’t exist, and argue that it doesn’t in court. These are not the actions of a poor beleaguered industry just trying to defend itself, they’re the actions of a fat, powerful industry trying to ensure that nothing can ever harm it, even and especially at the expense of the average consumer. After all, it’s been said time and time again (because it’s true) that DRM doesn’t do a thing to a tech-savvy person, as they can just get around it or find a cracked version. All it does is harm the ability of the average consumer, who doesn’t even know what a torrent is, to use the media they purchased the way they want to use it.

And the legacy of online piracy will be an online police state, because piracy gave the governments of the world little choice.

I’m sorry, infringing gave the governments of the world little choice? We see yet again the explicit conflation of “what’s good for the industry” with “what’s good for the country”. Filesharing has no effect on the government of the United States or any other country whatsoever. If we end up with an online police state, it’s because our governments are weak, filthy things that bow to the whims of their corporate donors rather than their people. Let me repeat this for emphasis: filesharing has no effect on the government of the United States or any other country whatsoever.

Normally, I’d be horrified. Under these cowardly and loathsome conditions created by the filesharers themselves, I’m okay with this now.
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Hope you’re happy with your petabyte of contraband. You traded your liberty for it.

You trade your liberty to protect the recording industry. You accept and embrace horrifying intrusions of the government into our private lives at the request of the recording industry. You refuse to speak up and say “That’s not right” because you assure yourself that as soon as everyone just stops filesharing the recording industry will stop all these silly lawsuits.

It won’t stop. The recording industry is engaged in one of the most powerful erosions of privacy and personal liberty in the history of America, and the world is following suit. You won’t get those rights back when this is finished. It’ll be law, actual law taught to judges and lawyers and written in big books, and it won’t easily change. Look at what’s being done. Look at how the recording industry is trying to remove “innocent until proven guilty” because they don’t have the ability to search our computers deeply enough to find sufficient legal proof. Look at how the recording industry is trying to make it legal for them to search your computers deeply enough, not so they can find the proof they want, but so they can find even more partial ‘evidence’ against you for further ‘crimes’. Look at how they choose to recoup their losses by suing millions of ordinary, innocent people. Look at how they are so sloppy and indiscriminate in their methods that they send cease-and-desist notices to networked laser printers.

The recording industry doesn’t care about you. They don’t care about what they’re doing to you. They don’t care about what the laws they are pushing will mean in the future when an FBI agent can enter your house at any time and demand you allow him to search your computer, demand that you give him any encryption keys or you go to jail, demand that you allow him to install government-sponsored spyware on your computer to monitor your actions online. This is not crazy conspiracy-mongering, it is exactly what the RIAA wants to be able to do. The recording industry doesn’t care about what the laws they are pushing mean right now, where it may be illegal to watch the DVD you just bought on your computer, or cut a ringtone from music you own, or get that computer game you bought working again after you installed new hardware (because you’ve already used up your ‘allowed’ registrations on previous hardware upgrades) or just because the game company folded and isn’t running their authentication servers anymore.

They don’t care about you.