I think it's terrible that anyone has had to pay a cent to the RIAA because "BOOHOO BECAUSE PEOPLE DOWNLOAD OUR MUSIC WE'RE LOSING 3 BILLION DOLLARS" (Yeah I know that's not the actual number, but the fact is that the number is ridiculous no matter what it is).

Yeah, this is ridiculous. The blank CDs I buy are more expensive because the **AA says they're being used to hurt their sales. Even if we assume that this is correct, nobody uses CDs anymore to copy stuff around. We've got torrents now. You can stop taxing that old media now, since whatever potential it had for piracy is now long gone.

Besides, any new music that I buy goes straight to the iPod. I also digitized all games that I'd like to keep. Why should I leave them on an unstable old physical disc that does nothing but deteriorate on my shelve?

I've thought of another question.  What do you think will happen to the industries if piracy continues along at its current pace (or becomes more widespread)?  Will the industries crumble, or will they buckle under the pressure and find a way to make money?

Piracy is going only one way: it's growing, and will continue to grow unless something else becomes more attractive to the users. That means the media companies will need to make it easier for us to get content quickly and at a low price. iTunes is a good start, for example. They need to expand on that concept.

If they don't, they will eventually start losing money because you can't sell a product that nobody wants. And if all they're going to be churning out are ridiculously expensive CDs, they won't have a viable business model. No matter how large, the dinosaur will fall.

Besides, there's absolutely no way that piracy can be stopped. Hackers will find their way around everything. The only thing that scares a hacker is a hardware lock, but even those will eventually be cracked, if they ever come to be (they most likely won't). Just take a look at the PSP, for example. Every single copy protection they've come up with has been cracked eventually. I'm not sure if they're still working on the latest. They've patched the thing up a zillion times, and even so it's still a matter of looking up the right documents; you can crack your PSP within 10 minutes if you know where to look. This has been true for every single software product as well. I think it's fair to predict that the only way to "stop" piracy is through legal means, but they have been losing support for that route for some time now.