Streamcast (Grokster, Morpheus) victorious in court

It´s nice hearing some good news from the front for a change.

Feels good! Finally someone who like the word P2P! Let the good times roll.....!

Good job Morpheus & Grokster! A rule of thumb: Piracy is directly proportional to product price. This doesn't just affect music & video content. For example: If a branded jeans manufacturer decided to greatly increase the price of its product and is a popular brand, then expect someone to make fake copies of the jeans product with brand name logo and start selling them in the stalls at a much more reasonable price along with their pirate CDs and so on. If CD prices were brought down to every day grocery prices, then expect shoppers to pop an album or two in their cart as with any other interesting reasonably priced grocery. In this case, people couldn't be bothered spending their time trying to download the contents of an album and thus piracy would not be such a big problem.

A rule of thumb: Piracy is directly proportional to product price. This is what its all about, price, are DVD prices fair, they have made a film, released it, made huge profits, then make a DVD of the film, does anyone know at what cost. Then they proceed to make more profit from these DVDs by charging exorbitant prices for them; small wonder there is piracy. Pirates are just robbing thieves.

i'm just throwing a twist on seanbyrne's comment and example of the jeans example.. you said that Piracy is directly proportional to product price. this is not necessarily true but assuming it was, lets look at a couple of situations. I do agree that if CD's were brought down to grocery store prices, more people would definetly be inclined to purchase them. However, this would not eliviate piracy because if Piracy were directly proportional to product price, FREE usually seems a better deal than not free; thus, priracy will still remain because why pay a couple bucks for something you can get for free? Now, for CDs by artists that you would not normally purchase at full price, you might be more likely to go buy the album if it were cheaper, but the actual increase in album sales (due to the massive price drop) would not offset the loss in revenues accumulated by such a price drop.. and further, the number of people who are doing the majority of the ripping of these CDs for the purpose of distribution will increase due to the fact that these CDs are now more affordable in the first place. an example, lets say you buy a CD and rip it and then share the mp3's on your p2p program of choice, assuming this is a new CD and not widely available online, your particular rip will spread like a wild forest fire. so basically you have a lot of demand (the downloader) being fed by few suppliers (the ripper). if cd's were sold at dramatically reduced prices (with the intent to attract more paying customers), we will end up with A LOT of demand (the downloaders) now being fed by a LOT of suppliers (if number of CD owners increases, the number of potential rippers increases).. in turn, increasing the supply of pirated material. now this is all speculative and a million and one situations could result, this just being one of them. the moral of this story is that once something can be obtained for free, it is very hard to convince the public to start paying for it.. my other thought on your piracy post: now we all know that if you produce and sell imitations of branded jeans, you are breaking the law because you are GAINING profit on someone else's product, but, if you produced imitation jeans for the purpose of wearing them yourself and NOT selling them to the public nor gaining profit from these imitations, would you be breaking the law? lets take it one step further and say that you made your imitation, and then proceeded to hand a few pairs out to your friends again not selling nor receiving profit, is this illegal? im not a lawyer or law school student, but i do have my education in business and finance, and although you are NOT seeing any gains from your product, you ARE affecting potential sales of the brands product and in turn, are potentially causing the company to suffer losses (not like 3 pairs of jeans will bankrupt any company) yet, people sue over anything and a loss in revenue/sales is damage to the company that could be pinned on you. i just realized i practically typed an essay and I don't really have a point, its just my thoughts on this topic. personally, i believe that p2p filesharing can't be stopped and the RIAA should focus less on trying to keep fans from hearing music they like, and more on strategies that can start offsetting the losses caused by filesharing. for starters, they might look at the fact that album sales are not a major contributor to an artists income and even multi-platinum record sales barely cover the cost of production and promotion (such as videos and overhead), the major source of revenues comes from concert ticket sales and merchandise, and my opinion is that the RIAA could tell the labels, artists, and all others involved in this useless complaining, to allocate their resources towards the profitable areas. do something to make more people want to go to concerts, increase those ticket sales, attract larger audiences.. after all, purchasing a CD may not be able to compete with a free mp3, but sitting at home downloading songs all night shouldn't be able to compete with watching a live performance.. all they need to do is figure out how to fill venues with people that are so used to being glued to their monitors..

by the way, im sorry that post was so long, it just pisses me off that these artists who are getting paid to do what they love (make music) are complaining about the fact that, by means of digital media and its ability to be reproduced, their music is getting exposure to a larger public than they could ever hope for. if p2p file sharing didn't exist, the number of people listening to any particular artist's song would be drastically downsized, by numbers far greater than the number of people that aren't buying their records because of it. some artists are making it apparent that their music doesn't deserve the honor of being heard by the public, that in itself, they take for granted.

Some artists have the nerve to call their songs Music, when 75% is just repetitive rubbish, what ever happened to real music.

Interesting opinions, always pro and against! There are some golden rules which will never die sweethearts: 1. as long as there's money there will always be piracy! and all the illegal stuf in the world. 2. the rich will always want to be richer cause the more you have the more you want. 3.usa has given one real good thing to the world: THE NET! and thank God no one can stop it anymore. and yes if you buy for instance Madonna's (mother-fucker old bitch!) album she'll laugh at your stupidity cause she'll get richer, but if you download "her" "music" she'll maybe start thinking (on how to crash the system!) so thank God for piracy and the net. Keep sharing dudes cause its a good feeling!

I totally agree with what Hapamoto said in the second post, to be honest i never read the first, its far too long :-) P2P services give the music industry a lot of advertisement. It has been shown in the past that p2p users download a song and if they like it, they may go and buy the album. Isn't that a good thing Music Industry? Chris

Yeah, but I suspect there will always be a certain kind of people, who just download everything they can get their hands on. I also think that the the industry might be filing all p2p users under that "brand", no wonder they´re pissed.

Thats a great job we need more of the same to acomplish something.