I get tired of the focus on music and video. Piracy takes place in all industries and is something everyone else just has to deal with.

Consider any company that has invested millions of dollars in building a brand or educating the consumer on their product (let alone the R&D) and along comes someone who decides to market a knock-off. The knock-off is pirating the marketing of the original company. The MP3 is a knock-off of the original media. Sometimes the knock-off designer purse or golf club is exactly the same material and quality as the original. It's the same issue.

I have spent millions marketing products before and have had to deal with 'copy' products. No one has offered to implement a tax and reimburse me for my losses.

I hate it when it happens. I could make considerably more money if it didn't happen. In reality though the fact that it happens is actually in the consumer's best interests. If I spend lavishly on marketing, that doesn't improve the quality of the product the end user buys, it merely means more people will pay more money for the same product. The piracy factor puts a cap on the marketing dollars I spend on a product and it puts a cap on the premium I can charge. If I spend lavishly on marketing or make my profit margin too high, the piracy gets worse. The piracy forces me to cap my marketing costs and profit margin and keeps in check the end price paid by the consumer. I'm forced to provide a product of 'value' where the margins between manufactured cost and sell price aren't too high to invite pirates and that pressure actually works in the consumers best interest.

Want to end music piracy? Drop the price of a download from $0.99 to $0.25 or $0.10 even. The increase in volume will make up for the reduced margins. 50 Million sales at $0.25 is still some good revenuce for a single track. Rampant piracy is symptomatic of consumer gouging. If these forces make all other industries respect consumer value, why should the music industry be any different?

Just 5 years ago, controls engineers wouldn't breath a word about how vulnerable the world was (and maybe still is). There are special computers called PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers) that control just about everything in this world from factories to power plants to waste management facilities. They are the brains of all automation. They are also all connected to computers and those computers are all networked on LANS. And in the past, those computers were every bit as likely to get viruses as anyone else's computer. The fortunate thing is that no one who ever wrote a virus ever bothered to write one that would mess with the logic in a PLC. It would have been so easy. In fact, it still is. 99% of all the PLCs in the world are connected to computers in an unsecured fashion. If a virus in a PC were to write randomly into PLC memory, whatever that PLC was controlling would come to an uncontrolled halt. Engineers would never figure out why all the processors were crashing - diagnostics don't exist to monitor this kind of attack. In the days of highly potent viruses like Nimda, it wasn't uncommon for scores of computers that connected to all the PLCs in a given facility to be infected. If Nimda or its kind carried a PLC targetting payload we would have seen disaster much greater than the biggest doomsdayers ever predicted from the millenium bug.