Pirate Bay's crime no greater than the industry fighting it

If The Pirate Bay's founders aren't in jail right now, it's because the world doesn't believe what they're doing is wrong enough for them to go to jail.

All the same, the very name of the site is an allusion to being almost explicitly used for illegal purposes. They break the law by facilitating the breaking of the law by others. The problem with this particular law, regarding copyrights, is that it seems public perception is that intellectual property isn't worth nearly as much as street value, especially when it comes to music.

There's good reason for this gut feeling. If a company can create a product for pennies, as is the case with digital music, but charges $15 for it, that company is reaping too much profit, by consumer standards.

For a while, consumers didn't have much choice. If you wanted to have a good-quality copy of a song, you HAD to buy it. You couldn't make one yourself, because the consumer grade recording equipment that was around up until about 15 years ago frankly sucked at reproducing good sound, in part because the sound quality wasn't that good in the first place: cassette tapes.

Once the MP3 file format was developed and popularized, reproducing songs became as easy for consumers to do as it was for the record companies. That meant most of the work that record companies were charging us for was no longer in their hands. So why, then, should we pay just as much for the music?

In fact, we're still doing just that. Look at the price of a song on iTunes. The new stuff costs $1.29. Extrapolate that over an album of a dozen songs, a fair average, and you've got the equivalent of a CD retailing for $15.48.

This doesn't make any sense, though. That price doesn't come with a nice little booklet or anything to hold onto at all. It comes with a shitload of electrons. Sure, it's more convenient, for which people are willing to pay. The problem with this equation is that it's just as convenient for the record companies, if not more so. They don't have to physically create products for iTunes. They just give iTunes permission to make copies of the record company's material, yet somehow the same amount of money is being charged for the product.

So why do people download music for free? Because fuck the recording industry, that's why. Anyone can see they're not playing fair. If it costs them a fraction of what it used to to get music to the customer, where's the savings? There's no savings, and it's because the record industry believes it's entitled to keep charging the same if not more than it did when it had to manufacture CDs, album covers, CD booklets, cases, package them, ship them to distributors who shipped them to sub-distributors who shipped them to music shops, who paid rent or a mortgage for retail rack space to sell these things.

So why aren't The Pirate Bay's founders in jail? Because the average person deep down thinks their accuser, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), is just as much a criminal, if not more so.