I understand the industry doing everything it can to protect copyright so they have lawsuits against people who will never possibly be able to afford the fines and they try to take down a torrent site and 5 more pop out as soon as one goes down.

But this is not lost dollars. The people who download the stuff for free - are not suddenly going to buy the things that they downloaded. It's not like they're going to see a sizable amount of revenue.

Rich people can simply walk into a Best Buy and buy 100 new release Blu Ray titles without even glancing at the price tag. These people never download because they can watch anything they want whenever they want. Further they can bring their family of five to every movie opening and buy everyone the large Coke and popcorn - the same people who buy season tickets behind home plate to the Yankees.

I am not rich by any means but I am a LOT richer in Hong Kong than I was and that affords me the ability to spend money at a restaurant or bar without really blinking that I could not do before.

And that's the reality - the poor people or borderline midlle class I suspect make up 95% of the "stealers" (downloaders). Take them to court and fine them $675,000 as was apparently recently done and lots of luck ever seeing that money. It's an exercise in futility.

I didn't buy a Blu-Ray unless it was under $20.

I made it my policy. The simple reason for this is I don;t like pissing money into the toilet to support the out right greed of the industry. I learned my lesson when I paid $70 for the boxed collector set of Schindler's List on DVD and 2 months later it was on sale for $24.99. And now with Blu-Ray all of the DVDs are basically worthless. And I watched other things - Star Trek TNG season began life at $170 per season - and dropped to $49 and it would go $62 and some seasons would be $39.

They charge whatever they think they can get and sadly if people simply wait them out you will see the real price - which will be drastically lower.

This all goes back to the financial class system - you're rich you buy it - you're poor you download.

So the best way to get money to support the film and music industry is to tax the hell out of the hardware and anything that can be recorded to. Canada implemented a per blank disc tax which was pretty hefty.

Before the tax went into affect I purchased about 200 blank CDs and DVDs. The tax basically double or tripled I can't remember the price of each disc.

You accept that people will copy and you say right "The hard drive is $120 there will be a $350 support the industry tax" on each drive. Rich people won't care - they're still going to buy the blu ray not download it because they want the case they want the quality and besides they have a massive home where they can put the stuff. The poor guy sis going to copy because he always would but you made him at least give some money to the industry.

And remember once the hard drive blows up in 4-7 years he has to buy another drive and pay another tax.

SIN taxes work - use them.