Nick D.:
I agree with much of what you've said about poor strategies by the record companies, but your justification for your "high-severity-copyright-infringement" obfuscates the fact that your music was obtained illegally, regardless of whether it's good for the record companies. And that's what pisses me off. Illegal filesharers take the moral high ground to somehow justify their illegal activities. Let's leave it up to the record companies to make their business decisions, let's not commit crimes against them, even if it's ostensibly to "help" them.

Sirdook:

ps: the theft still occurred at one point (a temporary "outcome" was a lost CD), even if the CDs were returned eventually.

Sirdook:

I'm sure my "outcome" argument has flaws if it's used as the only basis to establish whether actions are ideologically identical (i.e. under the law). I don't have an appropriate set of conditions which would fully define such "identicalness" -- but I think it's fair to say that in most cases, (rough) outcome similarity is a necessary (though not necessarily sufficient) criterion. Clearly though, with different outcomes, murder is not theft, and jaywalking is not rape.

You make a good point that there are no lost manufacturing costs when somebody downloads and burns their own CDs -- I hadn't considered that. But to argue that infringement in the case of filesharing is not the same as theft because the law says so seems naive, especially since such laws may not reflect the current digital age. While it's true that the data are just "copied", I think that filesharing is a unique circumstance in that it can perfectly replace a formerly purchased product, with very little expense on the part of the infringer (vs. photocopying (or scanning and printing) a novel, for example). So I still think that filesharing, as a specific form of copyright infringement, is, at the very least, more severe than our historic understanding of the civil crime (and I argue undeserving of such a euphemistic label).

Cory:

The heaviest downloaders may be the most prolific buyers (I'm trusting you on that one), but that relationship isn't grounds to demonize the record companies for seeking to protect the "first-time" distribution of their products.

It may be that it's a better business practice to allow unrestricted filesharing, but to me, that defies logic. Maybe we'll have to wait and see (and maybe that's what the companies are doing right now with this free-MP3 experiment). To reiterate, I don't agree with current DRM implementations, but I also don't disagree with the RIAA's desire to protect their products, somehow.

Maybe you disagree here, but I think that taking a CD from a record store is theft, and although the intermediate mechanism may be different when you download an album illegally, I think the results/consequences of these two actions (a CD/Ipod with the music on it) are comparable. So your use of "copyright infringement" here seems like a euphemism more than anything else.

In contrast, murder and "theft of life" have two different results: in one case (murder), there is no tangible possession held by the murderer, in the other case, there is (whatever's stolen). Similarly, "traffic" is not left with emotional scars, potential STDs and pregnancy, and social stigma, if it's "raped" by a jaywalker.

Cory, I disapprove of your inflammatory headline: "anti-fan lawsuits". They may be fans, but they're also (in the cases where the lawsuit claims are correct) thieves.

I have no disagreements with you over the heavy-duty suckage that is DRM. I don't want to buy or (legitimately) download some music because I don't want rootkits and other mysterious restrictions crippling my ability to enjoy it at a later date. That being said however, I also have no disagreement with the record companies wanting to control the "first-buyer" (vs. sharing among people who know each other personally) distribution of the music that they own. They just need a better way to do it (and they're not there yet... right now, they're going the wrong route trying to invade other people's PCs and limit the number of times stuff is copied, etc.). I don't have a solution for them, but I think it's unfair to demonize them like you do.