Over one billion pirate CDs will be sold this year:
Of the estimated total number of illegal music copies sold, 40% originate from factory production lines which produce professional-looking products but without paying any money back to the industry or artists.
Asia and Russia have been identified as hot spots for this.
Lookit that: actual organized criminals, mafiosi in Asia and Russia, engaged in actual, commercial piracy of music, directly corroding the bottom-line of the music industry.
Ironic, then, that the enforcement efforts from the RIAA and company have focused on efforts that will do nothing at all to slow these crooks. DRM, we're told, "keeps honest users honest." These are not honest users. The mafiyeh doesn't even slow down when it hits a DRM "speedbump." File-sharing networks are irrelevant to this — while some of these crooks may obtain their source material by downloading from P2Pnets, they have no problem simply buying one legit copy of the disc in question and taking it to their "factory production line" for "professional-looking" reproduction in bulk.
What terribly madness has seized control of the music industry, that it has decided to attack its customers who use file-sharing networks largely to source out-of-print music and to sample new music before buying it, rather than actually attacking the actual crooks who actually make money at the industry's actual expense?
