What do you hear from the bleeding heart opponents of file sharing? The argument is that by enjoying the content (music, video, text) without paying for it, I am depriving the artists of legitimate money they have earned through their hard work or even more absurdly that filesharing is stealing. In a word, the ??AA would have you believe that the only way to gain rightful access to the content is to give money to the artists' proxies (i.e., the ??AA).

Let's return to the real world from the happy fun spinland of the recording and movie industries. I am loathe to pay $20 for a piece of plastic with some music on it or $50 for a piece of plastic with a movie on it. If I really want a piece of plastic, I'm going to buy it used from one of the many used book/movie/CD stores or online at a fraction of the "rightful price". According to the ??AA's argument, this is equally stealing because none of the money I spend to get access to the content goes to the artist or their proxies. And what of those dens of iniquity, libraries?

I have to wonder why there isn't a concerted effort to shutdown used CD/DVD sales online, and I think it is because the lawyers are waiting to build up enough wins against the evil, filesharing pirates to legitimize the concept that we are supposed to give the corporations that act as the artists' proxies money before we can gain access to the content. Once that happens, they will move onto used CD/DVD sales by either attempting to stop the sales from occurring or by (more likely in my view) forcing the proprietors to send a cut of the action to the artists' proxies.