Dominic,
While I don't condone the way peer to peer networks operate (sucking bandwidth from the masses) and while it is true that some content is shared illegally on these networks, this is still a long way off from making peer to peer file sharing illegal.
The recording industry will call it illegal, because it is "bad for profits," not only because people will sometimes be inclined to download, rather than to purchase, but because it stimulates a free market economy in the recording world.
After the Second World War, recording was mostly the domain of large American companies or what remained of the rich European aristrocracy. The quipment and skills to produce recordings was in very short supply.
For most of the 20th century following the war, recording remained the domain of the large corporation or extremely wealthy private individual.
In many cases, artists would be contracted to record for a company, no artist could dream of having the financial means to purchase his own equipment and perform the recording himself.
The recording industry knew this and made sure to capitalize on it. Artists would often sign contracts where they would receive a mere 5% - 10% of the revenue generated by record sales and where the record company would retain all copy right in the works.
Now, for Britney Titney Spears and her friends from the Boy Band Brigade, that's not such a problem, since the world's teenagers always forget to take one vital item to the record store, their cerebrum.
Teenagers and mentally retarded adults will always buy the commercially targetted, mindless excrement produced by these so-called artists, promoted with million-dollar budgets by their record companies.
However, not all artists will sell 50 million copies in the first week. An unknown artist, new to the recording scene, producing serious music, will rarely sell more than 1000 copies of his first album.
At 5%, that's a maximum of R7 500 even if the CD sells at full price (R150).
That's about enough to support an artist for one month, and they would do better just getting a day job teaching at the local university.
However, in recent years, the equipment to produce quality recordings has become inexpensive enough to be within the reach of the general public. Also, using this equipment has become easy enough that most technically skilled people can use it to produce recordings of commercial quality.
By financing a recording himself, an artist can also collect all of the revenue from the recording. My dad recently recorded a CD of chamber music works. The project cost us roughly R16 000, but if we sell 500 copies, we will have made a profit of R44 000.
Here's where peer to peer networks come in. Many artists these days have taken to the idea of releasing atleast some part of their work under a license similar to Creative Commons (or under the CC license itself.)
These works can then be distributed easily by P2P networks to reach markets that the artist would normally never be able to promote to. The artist can then collect a decent profit selling the rest of the work in CD form, and in the case of modern music, in the secondary merchandising market (think t-shirts and autographed toilet seats)
The record industry do not like this. At all.
The main reason big corporations disagree with P2P file sharing is not because it hurts their sales so badly, but because it is quickly taking away from them, their monopoly on recording. That's a good thing. It means more artists can have access to the recording market, and will stimulate growth in the industry.
It's a bad thing for the large record companies who usually just ignore the real artist and focus on peddling mindless, dull, monotonous garbage to the intoxicated masses.
Losing their monopoly on recording would mean the big corporations would have to start working for their money again, instead of just over-promoting some anorexic blonde ex-stripper and making millions over night, before people realise it is garbage and can't return the CD due to "copyright restrictions."
Willie Viljoen
Web Developer
Adaptive Web Development