damn they're slow

kazaa? so 2002

I have some issue with why someone was still using kazaa in 2005 personally. The amount of illegal songs, not so much. But seriously, the RIAA basically announced they were hunting using KaZaa way back in like 2003. And the advantage of the internet and file sharing software was the de-centralized nature. All it really took was a means of distributing software for specific types access to the internet and that's about it. The name on the box, so to speak, was not terribly important. If someone really wanted to pirate music, they were going to find a way to do it and nobody could really expect to be tracking it with reliability. The problem I guess is the sheer laziness of most people.

The truly amazing part is how long such things have taken to resolve. The case itself started in what, 2006/7? And the RIAA has been suing people for almost a decade. Meanwhile, Apple and others went into the digital music market and invented one, one in which they get paid and which seems to conform, at least occasionally, to the demands of consumers. I've heard much less about "downlifting" and online piracy cases since the heady days of the late 90s and the early internet file sharing efforts. Pirate Bay is about the only one I've heard of.

There were lots of complaints about piracy but the truth seems to be more that the industry was slow to catch on and capitalize on new forms of media (not that this was a unique problem of music executives or even of the internet/digital revolutions). They saw such things not as an avenue for more profits (perhaps at lower margins), but as a competition within their own industry somehow. Statistics vary, but it doesn't seem clear that free or even pirated distribution of music has even truly hurt the overall revenues of music providers and producers. Only specific old guard titans have gotten clobbered, making it only worse for themselves by not taking the money from a scorched earth policy of downlifter prosecution and investing it in a digital distribution method of their own.