I would disagree with the killing the industry bit but other then that I agree.

All the consumer usage studies i've seen haven't shown an impact in "real" sales lost.

Though they were mostly music studies.  In general they found piracy didn't effect consumption vs the control, and that within the group of pirates... the more you pirated, the more CDs you bought rather then less.

Outside of the "SUPER COLLECTORS" anyway who have their own PCs for music and shit.

In general piracy just seemed a gauge of interest in the medium.

Real pirates don't steal, they share. Yaaarrr!

They also do a lot of trading with ninjas. You know, the cutlass-for-shuriken thing.

To be honest I was using "Killing the industry" as just a figure of speach. Harming the industry is probably more accurate.

Your post: I can live with people downloading an album getting into a band and then buying the album, that's somewhat more acceptable that compulsive downloading. I hate those who do habitually though, the ones that think "I'll just download 100 films, as opposed to buy one I do", it gets on my nerves. I have a few friends who just download no end. I know one guy who has a 2TB media server that is practically rammed full of movies, music, games, e-books, everything. I don't agree with that kind of behaviour at all, there must be thousands of pounds worth of lost sales on that one media server alone.

I wrote a report on piracy (don't ask why, it was tenuously related to my course at best) a few years back at University and I found some interesting results. The essence of it was that a dynamic system for piracy control that dealt with the issue on a global scale (Breaking down regions and seperating piracy laws based on environment conditions) could work.

Essentially I said that countries like China and other developing countries with high populations and a low income population are common offenders of breaking piracy laws in a manner that doesn't benefit the distributors. However, the reason for this constant law breaking is that they can't afford entertainment costs and this is one of the main driving factors.

But in the developed worlds like Europe and USA I found that people broke piracy laws but did it out of the idea of "getting something for free" as opposed to necessity and one of the results of this was that people were discovering good shows from other countries and subsequently opening up new channels of distribution and a platform for culture testing that were unavailable before.

One of the example I used was the daily show with Jon Stewart, a very American TV show, but it had a high download rate in Britain. This lead to TV channels bidding to show a programme that would have had very few channels interested in before. I believe it is opposite for some British shows in America too, like Top Gear.

So my conclusion was that a system that adhered to strict piracy control in countries like China combined with a system that offered entertainment at a far cheaper price and 'en masse' would work best in those environments. And in the developed countries a system that was strict on piracy for shows that are produced in their country of origin was needed, but almost no control over piracy from shows that were shown in other countries could be beneficial by opening up new testing grounds and distribution channels, making people more interested. This in turn could actually generate more profit from piracy than it would ever lose.

Anyway, I only really said all that in my report because I knew that forming an hypothesis based on a new media model would have got me a high grade, and it did. I still don't agree with piracy.