I just read on SLASHDOT that the average budget for major, multi-platform video games is $18-28 million. How does this match up with the average cost of a Hollywood movie?

CYBERsitter is a private company and its potential award probably wouldn't have any effect on paying off the national debt, but the US government is always free to dismiss lawsuits in the interest of the sovereign. Reagan dismissed the suits (against Iran) of the hostages he freed; he did this to avoid international problems.

all better! thanks!

Downloading an album certainly affects commerce. Each album is about $15 that will not enter the stream of commerce. But should that person be liable for $750-$30,000 per work infringed (which could be each song on the album)? Such draconian penalties are ridiculous. There was a time when money counterfeiters were hung, disemboweled, emasculated, and cut into four pieces. In fact, Sir Isaac Newton was famous for condemning counterfeiters to death in this fashion, and he was an intellectual man. If this were still the punishment for counterfeiting, there would probably be fewer counterfeiters. But such punishments bear no relation to the crime of counterfeiting in the same way that statutory damages bear no relation to the actual damages caused to "commerce."

I believe that applications like Pandora and Hulu will do well. But they are not a substitute for music on demand in that a user of Pandora cannot pick the precise song he wants to play. Nor can the user listen to music outside of a WiFi hot spot. Furthermore, Pandora has recently moved to a model where it will have to compensate artists via SoundExchange, the internet equivalent to ASCAP or BMI. This compensation is inconsistent with the advertisement driven business model that Pandora began with.

To answer your next question, I do not know what is used for commercial reason. However, I do not think that there should be a presumption of commercial use in cases of end-users downloading music and movies. Shawn Fanning did seem like a normal kid who downloaded for non-commercial reasons, and he did. He only made money when he sold Napster. Thus, the legal dynamic that exists today, and that has existed since Napster, is that of creating an illegal application that is user friendly, then build a fan base, get sued, and sell the application for millions. This has been repeated with The Pirate Bay. However, if non-commercial downloading were presumed legal, then people would not make millions of dollars breaking the law. This is precisely the kind of conduct that I think should stop, and I think would stop if downloading were presumed legal if not used for commercial gain.

I think that the songwriter Montt Mardie put it best when he said, "An artist has got to make a living just like everybody else, there's no doubt about it. And these are tough times, believe me I know. The thing is though, if I were to go back in time, 10 years or so, and tell the 15-year-old version of myself that over a night, 60 000 people had heard one of my songs, the first question I'd throw back at myself wouldn't be "how much money did I make?" Montt Mardie recently wrote a song that is free to download; it is called "We're All the Pirate Bay," and can be downloaded, remixed, and uploaded without incident.

There does need to be a threat of action against violators, I agree. But that threat should not extend to the non-commercial user who only wants to listen to more music than his wallet will allow. Certainly not the draconian punishment that was handed to Jammie Thomas-Rasset. Multi-million dollar civil penalties should be reserved to those making profit from downloading illegally.

Sometimes I think about the consequences of downloading, and I think, "what if no one downloaded illegally?" But then I realize that the people who currently download illegally would not buy every album in the absence of free sharing programs. Quite to the contrary, I think that the current downloaders would be much less sophisticated without sharing programs. They would be limited to the music that their wallets would allow, and would have music libraries that would be dwarfed by any "illegal" downloader's library.

What do you think about Lawrence Lessig's argument that we are making our kids criminals by making non-commercial file sharing illegal. Millions of kids download and know that they are doing so outside of the law; they don't care. Most of these kids will not understand that the criminal laws that are ridiculous are merely the copyright laws; instead, they may think that other laws are laughable also. This lack of understanding means that the kids will disobey other laws under the same pretense that they are laughable.

Lets remove the excuse, and stop suing people who download for non-commercial reasons.

Well, it seems the line between downloading and providing is blurring. I believe that Jammie Thomas, who recently had a judgment against her for "making available" copyrighted works, was never proven to have downloaded anything, nor was there any evidence that any person besides agents of the record companies downloaded the songs from her. Basically, she was ordered to pay $80,000 per song for having 24 songs in a shared folder on her computer.

In other words, the way the law stands, if you are caught downloading you may be liable for any unauthorized file on your computer. The procedure the record and motion picture companies follow is to send a request to settle letter as soon as they have evidence that you have downloaded one of the works in their catalogs. The letter will explain statutory damages and request several thousand dollars. If the addressee of the letter does not want to settle, they may be sued by the people sending the letter. This is what happened to Thomas.

Once a lawsuit has commenced, the addressee of the letter will likely be required to run a program on their computer. The program searches for media files which also may be evidence of further copyright infringement. If the lawsuit has started and the person with infringing files deletes them, they may be guilty or obstruction of justice, which may be worse than the damages for copyright infringement.

To answer your question, on the BitTorrent or other p2p networks, as soon as you have started downloading, you are also providing by being a "seed." "Download" and "provide" are becoming synonymous.

Rather than answering the question of whether the companies might lose thier right to pursue infringers, I would suggest the entertainment industry find another business model. An absolute deterrent not being possible, the next best thing is not an ineffective deterrent but a different method of payment for content. All over the internet, content is free, even on many sites authorized to host the content by the right holder. On these authorized sites, the content is paid for by advertising. Personally, I'm happy to watch a commercial or view an ad if I am able to watch TV on demand from any computer with access to HULU.

But that stuff only applie to music and movies. Software companies would seem to have no choice but to sue the people who download, as there seem to be no software sites where you can view a commercial to play. However, even when the software companies receives a judgment against a downloader, I don't think they can really call it a "win".

In the end, I think the incentive to create will still exist if law suits against downloaders stopped. Perhaps the incentive for the big industries will shrink, but surely they would equalize with the incentives that anyone else has. The question is: is this what we want to happen? Certainly, in the digital world, the home user is able to create music, movies, and software with great production values. Look at MC Lars, Steal this Film, and Open Office, respectively, as examples of user created content. I think user generated is pretty good.