Re:The producers will starve (Score 1)

I think the most important thing about what I'm saying here is the trend. I've noticed over the last year, and continue to notice, a dramatic increase in the amount and types of piracy by my peers. I think any college student (at least at my school) would agree with this assessment. It is actually getting easier and more common to pirate copyrighted materials - music, movies, tv, even books. If this trend continues, piracy will move more and more towards having a significant negative financial impact. In fact, one of those articles you linked to, "Music Sales in the Age of File Sharing" by Eric S. Boorstin, seems to corroborate this:

My findings suggest that file sharing is not the cause of the recent decline in record sales, and that file sharing decreases the record purchases of younger people while increasing the purchases of older people.

Right now, file sharing may not be bad for sales. People are creatures of habit - the older generation is more used to buying CDs, and they're more opposed to technology in general, so it is natural that file sharing may not affect their consumption patterns. But as the younger generation becomes the older generation, they will bring their habits with them too, and I don't think they are likely to abandon file sharing in favor of buying records. And forget about the generation that are the kids now - they'll probably never even see a CD in a jewel case. Basically, I'm saying that I think piracy is going to become a bigger and bigger issue, until it actually begins to have real, measurable, negative financial impact on content producers. And I really don't think lawsuits or DRM is going to be a solution. I think 10 or 15 years in the future the media industry will be dramatically different - but how, I'm not exactly sure.