Folks, most recording artists don't make crap either. It's not that their music doesn't make millions, it's that they don't see it.
This was the case before napster.
The record companies have been a classic oligopoly. Back when they shifted from vinyl to CD (when the power and draw of independent was at its zenith, incidentally), they doubled the price of music and they slashed the royalties to artists, and they did this while shifting to a medium that even then had a far lower material cost.
Then remember their war against used CDs?
Now CD burners are almost as ubiquitous as cassette recorders; and the internet -- in spite of their efforts -- is a force they can't stop.
Music piracy is so pervasive, they're left iwth the following options:
A) Let it go unchecked (and go bankrupt).
B) Adapt their business model (but to what?)
C) Use expensive security technologies to limit duplication (the software industry found out long ago that these don't work).
D) Threaten lawsuits against the millions of pirates (suing your potential customers is not good business)
E) Try to shut down the internet as we know it (spend lots of cash in Washington -- after all those guys don't know crap about technology)
F) Take advantage of the internet's weaknesses to make music piracy an inherently risky proposition. Use third parties to exploit weaknesses and screw with people's computers who pirate music.
I'd take F. Kazaa is already a giant trojan horse, why not make it work for the record companies?
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anyway, the point is that all those years of screwing people over have come back to bite them in the prettythang. The recording industry for years has worked on the principle that people buy their music from them because they're the only source for the music people are exposed to in their daily lives (MTV, radio, and so on). And on the other side, they've exploited artists for the same reason.
Now those decades of greed have caught up with them, and, illegal or no, they're losing their core revenue stream, and the only effective thing business-wise that I see they can do about it is resort to illegal tactics themselves.
