I was under the idea that typically companies don't sell 100% of there company when they IPO. The owners keep a percentage, initial investors keep a percentage, and with all the new money coming in they give the new owners the rest. So the key to the IPO is for the owner to keep a 50% share. Typically then the owner just sell that stock over time to make tons of money.

A crime is prevalent, punishment is not working, let's just make it legal!

It's not the one song that is the problem, it is that you are sharing on the internet. A public form that has billions of people on it. It is very possible that you shared that 1 song 100,000 times. Unfortunately you didn't keep track of everyone that downloaded it. However I bet if you did have nice logs, the court and any sane jury would easily reduce the fine to near copies * normal purchase cost

So fair use is a little different topic, how much control over derivative works a copyright owner has can be a big debate. But how many people are getting a judgment for $625,000 against someone who did a remix or mashup?

People aren't getting harsh punishments for derivative works (remix or mashups), they are getting in trouble for exactly copying an original work

I still think that the punishment weakly correlates with the crime. You shared a song with the entire internet for free. There is the small possibility that many people copied the work because of you and thus weakly correlates to lost money of the copyright owner. Because of the scale of the internet your sharing could approach $625,000 of lost revenue.

If that is too much for you, next time you share just put a logging mechanism on your sharing program. When the RIAA sues you and ask for $625,000, you can say I only have 1000 downloads, so I only should owe you $1000

Yes I don't think we can agree on that. Two wrongs don't make a right in my book. To a point I can agree with cheating a corrupt system, the problem with the copyright system is how do you draw up who is corrupt? There are people that don't abuse the copyright system, can we still steal from them? I personally just try and avoid the corrupt ones and deal as often as possible with those not abusing the system.

If a law is justified, and there aren't cases were breaking the law is justified, I don't see how a harsh punishment is bad. If it is something you shouldn't be doing, easy to know if you are doing and you willfully do it, you should be punished accordingly.

It's more of a matter of difficulty in detection. Consider a crime that is easy to commit, can be commit very often, has very non-obvious or long-term outcomes, and is very hard to detect. How do you stop such a crime? There really isn't anyway to stop such a crime, the only way to prevent it is to get people to agree that the crime is bad and not to do it, or fear the punishment. Harsh punishments work well in the situation.

Let me clarify.

There are many other Fabs and quality engineering other then intel. I don't think it's a stretch to say that without the burden of copyright one of these other fabs could easy mimic if not straight up copy an intel processor and sell it for a lot less then the cost that intel does. Intel is making a tidy profit, because their competition is low, and there are no new entrants into the x86 market because of copyright and patents

Cost structure is very important, let's take for example a normal cheap PC these days that cost $300. If we looked at all the components in that PC and evaluated them for the raw costs to produce that extra component (with no upfront development costs), I would guess that the PC has about $50-$100 dollar of costs if not less. With no copyright system enforced by the goverment, I propose that we would see intel go out of business because they would never recoup their billion dollar investment in there processor when others copy and sell it just above raw costs.

In fact I would say that a majority of copyrighted material would not be made, because the payback period becomes (profit margin) / (time it takes to copy the item) versus (profit margin) / (time of copyright), This is especially bad for digital media creators because copying is available immediately.

Jaywalking can kill you. It's not a great analogy because its a law design to protect yourself. There are also many situation where jaywalking is to your advantage without risk of injury, so the punishment for subverting the law is small and often unenforced. Walking and transportation are also an essential part of life.

Sharing songs that you didn't make with the entire internet doesn't seems very essential. It really seems like you are just saying a big middle finger to the people who made those songs. It's also a very difficult to come up with a scenario in which breaking the law is justified(Abandoned or lost work?). If it is something that has no justifiable reason, the punishment being harsh seems to be a reasonable deterrent.

Personally I believe there should be much stronger copyright laws with reasonable fair use provision for a much shorter but reasonable time period. This is the only logical conclusion I can come to. Honestly unless you are a commodity laborer, Your value to your company is the creativity and intelligence you put in your job. Trust me, if your company could steal similar creative and intelligent work for free they wouldn't be paying you. Since I contribute my works in exchange for cash, I feel like if I consume works, I should pay cash.

I do agree that the labels have a strangle hold and are abusing the system, but I choose not to cheat the system, but not to support the labels.

Yes they absolutely do! Trust me the difference between the cost Intel pays for each chip and what you pay is padded with a huge profit and initial investment recoup cost. Copying the design wouldn't be very difficult. There are many methods. Electron Microscope to reverse engineer, paying an insider to give you trade secrets, stealing key employees with intimate knowledge of design. Even if they were 6 months behind technology wise, an x86 compatible computer that ran at 75% of Intel speed for $50-100 would crush Intel's market

Because of the current system, you almost never see Big Corporations subvert the Copyright system because they know they will get sued out of existence. Why worry about the guy in the garage? For the most point it has been ignored, however, the internet has made it so that the guy in a garage can do a lot of damage with little resources. However this doesn't mean we can throw out the copyright system, we just have to start enforcing it equally on everyone.

Both are illegal, however it is pretty hard to find downloaders without doing the uploading yourself (which seems a lot like entrapment, and offering to upload your owned content for free could imply a license to download). Because of this and the fact that without uploaders there are no downloaders, most copyright owners have chosen to legally pursue uploaders.

Does not sharing those songs, make you life so unbearable that you can't continue?

I don't see how making a profit on digital media is asinine. That's like saying making a profit on anything is asinine. Everything should have perfect competition and we should pay just above exactly additional input costs for an additional unit. This does happen sometimes, but they call them commodities, not creative works. You have to realize that without Copyright, Patents and other methods of control distribution of Creativity are the only way to encourage Creativity. Do you like your Ipod, Intel Processor, GPS, Collected Data(Maps), etc? Without control methods there is no incentive for initial investment to create, and the only things that will be made are commodities. Apple would not spend X million dollars to create the iphone if they knew that once they started selling it a "copy" company would build the same products using the same chips and Apple's software and sell it just above the costs of parts. Digital media is just an extreme example of this because the cost of selling another unit is negligible.

I really hate the argument, well they can make money off the tours and other stuff. Who to say a better performer can't steal your well written song? What's to stop another band from imitating your sound and throwing a tour that happens to play in every city you do and the same time, but at 1/4 the price for admission? What if someone else sold merchandise of your band?

If you don't agree with their system, don't participate in it. Don't subvert laws and break the system and then call the punishment stupid. If anything the best way to break a system, or someone abusing it to make absurd profit is to support their competitors!

This doesn't make sense. Most people just file bankruptcy and don't end up paying $625,000 The monetary damages should correlate with losses, but to another point they should be a deterrent to the crime. If you were caught letting people download a DVD and only had to pay for the cost of the 1 person (the RIAA) who downloaded and sued you ($20?), everyone would pirate.

Throwing it away is the only way to break this bad pricing model. The printer company will lose the potential revenue stream from ink on that specific printer and might eventually come to its senses and have a good pricing model. In fact doing this a lot of times will help. I must say that I've been tempted when I found a sale in which printer + ink was cheaper then ink alone.