Copyright? or Copyleft? --CONTINUED--

This is a continuation of my previous post 'Copyright? or Copyleft?' so yeah, you should probably read that one first.

Lets go onto another topic of interest that relates to the copyright issue; enforcement. Of course people are always going to steal music, it's not like you can just stop it all by using some scare tactics. It's just the way technology works; when someone builds a wall, someone else builds a mechanism to destroy that wall. The ways that the record labels are trying to destroy the problem is more cruel than anything though, at least to me.

Bands have to sell their copyright to someone so that no one steals it, this way they can profit off of their original works of 'art' and no one can directly steal it and claim it as their own work. When people DO steal it, then the company that they sold those rights to take action and start suing. Most of the time however, the prices that they charge for someone illegally download their music is outrageous; the price range can be from 100 dollars to somewhere around 250,000 dollars PER SONG. That's bad enough and it only gets worse, the money that the record labels get from suing doesn't go to the band itself; instead it goes straight to the company that owns their copyright. I myself know someone who's been sued for downloading music, and it was only for about two albums. He had to settle, and paid a small fine rather than fighting and being forced to pay more of a hefty amount. Those two albums cost him around 3,000 dollars or so for something that he could have spent around 16 dollars on. That's just dumb, people shouldn't have to pay that much for something so small when the money that gets taken from doesn't even go to the bands that they were 'stealing' from.

This brings us right back to enforcement, no matter how much some people have to pay for music that they stole and no matter how publicized it gets, people are STILL going to download music. It's just too easy to do that people don't want to stop. An equivalent situation would be something like.... books. Now I'm not talking textbooks, I'm talking about books that you read for fun. Lets say that there was a way to just take a book without paying for it, a way to just be like 'hey. I want a book.' and then one would just appear in front of you. So, with that in mind lets say that the way people got those free books was illegal. If you possessed an amount of those books and people found you, then you would be fined SO MUCH. Now everyone likes books; comic books, fiction, non-fiction, fantasy, you name it. Would you stop using that method? If someone you knew got fined for having those books then would you stop? I wouldn't, I mean getting those books for free is so much easier; for school as well. (annotations?) and why pay 15 to 20 dollars on a book when you can just have it?

I'm not sure if I can really SAY what I want to say here, it's a little hard for me to explain out :/
Thanks for reading (if you ARE reading)