Yes you are correct. Success stories like below do not exist. If you decide to cut out the middle-man either fully or even partially, you can NEVER be a commercial success or have fame. Beware the bogey man!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingrid_Michaelson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macklemore

What I find very interesting is this very American idea of measuring success by the amount of money an artist makes. It is perfectly fine to have someone screeching to pure noise, as long as studios' marketing convinced us that this was "the voice" and had an expensive contract to prove it. Vincent van gogh would be considered a total failure for example, by today's standard. It is not enough that you were able to have career based on music and were able to cater to a vast audience. Since artists did not usually become extremely rich, ergo we never had good artists. Thus Vincent van Gogh never existed. Nor did Franz Schubert.

*This* Industry however is not necessarily the source of all entertainment. There was a time when the industry did not exist, but entertainment still existed. The reason you have these torrent sites is because the industry has been very very good at monopolizing, stifling and killing any independent entertainment. People might not necessarily want to rob a talented artist that they love. But they might still not give two hoots about short-shifting a faceless greedy faceless "corporation" or a bunch of greedy middlemen. The industry has its time and place when they actually provided value by handling distribution of content that would not have been possible without them back then. In the digital internet era, that is no longer the case. They are perceived merely as blood-sucking parasites that leech off both the artist and the public.

If Mariah carey had gone independent instead of being with Columbia or Virgin Records etc. she would have been able to retain all of the profits, instead of just 10-15% share of it. Consider the irony. The middle-men should be the one getting the 10-15% profits after deducting actual costs. But instead, it is the content creator.

What ends up happening is, that labels latch on to a "hit formula" and kill creativity by making snoop dogg and other artists sacrifice their styles in favor of the "formula", to maximize revenue. Worse, with their publicizing muscle and money, they don't exactly provide a level field for independents, since they ensure that the independents are all but drowned in the noise of all the ads, even if their own artists might be all but junk.

He is not subject to laws of the USA because he is Australian? Wanna bet?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_Tort_Claims_Act

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sosa_v._Alvarez-Machain

In essence, US claims that one way or the other, USA has jurisdiction over every living person on earth. You might be a British citizen, who has never been to USA and has not broken any of the British laws, but you can be prosecuted regardless, if you knowingly or unknowingly broke US laws, without ever setting foot in USA.

Get off your high-horse!!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions#List_of_countries_by_2012_emissions_estimates

Why exactly have US and China managed to stay on top of the list continuously for past few years, without managing to act the least bit "responsible"? Mod me troll or flamebait if you want to, but Japan even on per-capita basis is lower on list than most other countries. If US and Chinese politicians are willing to sit on their asses and screw the world, why this special onus of "responsibility" on Japan? USA could have done better, and should have so long ago. But US government was more busy trying to convince everyone that global-warming was a "myth" and attempting to argue that it was better to kill the planet than "harm the economy". When we go painting Japan as "one of the world's top polluters", let us remember to name and shame the top two or three as well.

And what exactly is the problem that you have? Is your hatred for google so unreasonably moronic, that you would rather not permit any communication channels remaining open in disaster areas, lest *horrors* google made some profit? Newsflash!!! Google is a for-profit corporation. They are bloody well supposed to provide the maximum return legally possible to their shareholders, for their investment! From what I have seen, google at least behaves downright angelic while starting people-locating projects like (http://google.org/personfinder/global/home.html) for free. Where are such projects from Apple and Microsoft? If they came up with the idea, damn right they should be allowed to earn some reasonable amount of money from it, to invigorate and encourage such creativity and inventing. That is the whole damned purpose of having patents!!! It is at least lot more reasonable than apple trying to stifle competition by patenting nonsensical stuff like "round corners".

Dear "Genius"(and I use the word loosely), I should remind you that mere box-cutters were sufficient for 911 hijackers. If you had an ounce of brain, you would have realized that airport and plane toilets provide complete privacy to construct these devices at leisure. And once you have the explosives rigged up, the fire-making ones can be placed near a seat to take out a couple of passengers to create panic. All this is moot however.

The only reason you cannot and shall not have another 911 is because, earlier there was an expectation amongst crew and passengers that if they complied, there was a very reasonable chance that they would get to survive, but now people would simply take any would-be hijackers apart. So if there is another attack vector, it will likely be very very similar to 26/11 mumbai attacks. A very public suicide mission to attack people in crowded mall or landmark, like the Kenya westgate shopping mall attack. You do NOT need the TSA anymore. Passengers on the plane are now all the security one needs. TSA is just a waste of money post-911. But as far as effectiveness of gadgets is considered, they would have been considered pretty effective pre-911 since they can actually kill a person or two. They would have worked just effectively as box-cutters. in a pre-911 world. But post-911 what one should expect is mumbai 26/11 style attacks. Sadly, terrorism sponsoring states like Pakistan are actually being funded by USA to do trial-runs of such attacks on rival countries, before they are launched against US itself. And that is the real problem. You guys fund, train create your own terrorists, to get your own nation attacked. And then you geniuses think that spying on, and strip-searching your own citizens will solve that problem for you.

Looks like after the oil wars, it might very well soon be India's turn...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#Reserve_estimates

How about being reasonable, and having it as "You broke laws and made profit illegally, so we take away ALL of that illegal portion of your profits that was made illegally and charge a 5-10% penalty on top of that, so that it is no longer profitable for you to break our laws" ?

Corporations care just for the profits. If it is profitable for them to break laws, despite the current penalties involved, they will do so. Make it unprofitable and they are as law-abiding as the next guy.

You know, it might be kinda better than all that xenophobic bullshit about FOREIGNERS making profittttsss off you.... and trying to shut them down and costing even the legitimately employed folks of the company, their jobs. But I guess, racism and xenophobia is more popular...

While we are playing what-ifs... could George Bush have been stopped in 2001? I mean if we didn't have him in first place, we quite likely would not have had Snowden later. Root cause analysis cannot be stopped half-way.

Think of it this way. Let us take the number two reason for such breaches of personal privacy(money being the number one reason), i.e. terrorism.

If you were actually a foreign terrorist, and for some insane reason you did decide to discuss your "super secret plans" in email or over phone, unless you are completely retarded as well, you will use your local dialect instead of English. And you will use common words or phrase *in your own dialect* as previously agreed codewords. You will NOT communicate in English. So NSA might flag the foreign language conversation as suspicious, but I doubt there will be a perfect automatic speech translation in place that can immediately translate. And even if you had someone translate ever single piece of foreign language conversation, you still will have to deal with guessing what the code words mean.

In other words, a sweeping eavesdropping program will get you zilch unless you even for a second believe the other guys to be total morons. They might be insane, but they are not at least that. Only time you will have results by eavesdropping is if you already knew someone to be a terrorist, and were monitoring all their calls and tried to assume everything to be a terrorist communication.

The other situation where you will have results is, if we change the definition of results to "eavesdrop on our own troublemaker citizens and political opponents and have blackmail material on them to ensure we stay in power". Now *those* are the guys who will communicate in a language your eavesdropper program can listen to and collect material on. Think of collecting bits and pieces of info on every time someone mentions your political opponent's name and sifting through that to see if you can find anything on him to ensure his complete submission.

And unless you want to have a de facto dictatorship cemented even further and no chances of having even a semblance of democracy, feel free to sacrifice privacy. You will eventually sacrificing your freedom or liberty too.

What internet has really done is killed the middle men and studios. Your average professional musician was getting a miniscule fraction of the payouts anyways. Internet and computers simply allows them to record the music and distribute it, without needing the studios/middle men. Even they got a few cents off each copy purchased at app stores, they still end up earning the same for a million copies downloaded. Quality of studio recordings? Well people who want higher quality, will pay for it. But apparently public has already ruled on that. It is music studios and middle men, who are failing to adopt. The music studios in any case were fleecing both sides, first the artist for allowing him to record his music and then overpricing it for the public. And on top of that, only ones public got to hear were the musicians that studios selected. Much better musicians were ignored by them due to lesser "charisma" or whatever. Take Milli va Nilli case for example. The studios blatantly stole the song and presented it as the work of another, just because they thought that original musicians were not "presentable". And on top of that, digital media single song downloads ensure that I do not need to pay for the whole damned album when only one song in it is good. As such, even the musicians have to ensure that each of their songs is good, if they want people to pay for it. As such the music quality on average can only go up, instead of down.