my only question is what are the music and movie business so worried about (software is another issue entirely)?

MP3s are not nearly as good quality as CDs (8 hours of music on a disk). Pirated movies are rediculously bad quality, and can be rented in a movie store for $3.00. Downloaded movies will not be able to compete with movie theaters until most people have 30 foot tall screens in their home-theater.

How much money do musicians and film studios need to make?

I think the people are speaking against CDs that cost pennies to make being sold for $15.00, concert tickets that cost around $35.00, and movie ticket prices going up by $0.50 every year (with a profit of millions of dollars). This is aside from big musicians and top-list actors making millions personally.

Perhaps this is also a reaction against the handful of media corporations being nearly the sole dictators of the content of media (Music, TV, Movies, News) available to the public.

These viewpoints are not intended to condone theft, however I think the Music and Movie industries would benefit by learning from the message implied by the huge increase in filesharing and implement changes in their sales methods accordingly: We don't want to pay so much for your products; We want to be able to pick-and choose the content we buy (buying only the songs we want, for example); We want a greater variety of content; We want at-your-fingertips availability.

I say again that I don't know what the music and movie industries are worried about. We are the same people who shelled out $300 for the first CD players, and repurchased our record, 8-track, and tape collections in the name of improved quality. We are the people who buy High Definition, flatscreen TVs, pay $2.00 extra to go to IMAX theaters, and will probably pay more for digital movie theaters to show movies as well as pay-per-view events.

Filesharing is an exponentially larger means of theft than taping songs off the radio or from CDs, movies off TV or from videocassettes, and sharing bootleg concert recordings. However, as long as the media industries continue to improve media quality itself, and perhaps reevaluate their sales methods, filesharing poses the same threat as these other pirating technologies.

Whew,
Gratis