Derek, no hard feelings, just debating the subject. Maybe downloading one song will not hurt anyone a great deal, but does it stop at one song.

I was a vegetable farmer and every once in a while I would come across a spot in my fields where someone had helped themselves to a cabbage or two, no great value, maybe $1.00 at retail. They probably justified it to themselves that I'd never miss a cabbage or two, but if a few hundred people did the same thing, I would soon be out any profit that I was entitled to make for my hard work. One night my wife caught someone stealing vegetables from my neighbours field, she called the cops and they caught him with the vegetables in his car. He was fined more than the vegetables were worth, but not enough to discourage him from doing so again. If the fine is too small, it is no deterrent. I know of poachers that put aside the money they get for the sale of their first poached moose, so they have money to pay the fine they get when they finally get caught, maybe after selling 50 moose. The fine was just part of the cost of doing business. After the law wised up and started taking trucks, boats, quads, etc., only then did poaching slow down a bit.

Just as crooks will use young teenagers to do their dirty work, knowing if the teen gets caught, they will only get a slap on the wrist, while the real crook is not implicated in the crime. That is what these illegal sites are doing, they are telling people it is OK to download someones music, knowing that they ( the downloader) will be the ones punished, not the crook that offers the service for a small fee or for the advertising revenue it brings into his site. Sure, they should be the ones punished too, but if there were no customers, there would be no suppliers. Maybe the firms that pay these sites to put up their ads should be held accountable, they are aiding and abetting the down loading of illegal music.

Teens could use their grandmothers PC to down load music and transfer it to their own PC or burn it to CD, hoping if it was traced to their grandmothers PC, that the RIAA would take pity on their grandmother. Using your grandmother for a front, could happen, especially with the morels of today's youths, oh oh, the last time I said that, a holy war started.LOL

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