@MrMazda:
It just goes to show that copyright trolls will stop at nothing to try to extort money from the people… It makes me very glad that I take a higher level of anonymity on the internet these days.
You are absolutely right. I've never seen anybody say this though.
The lost SALES of music, movies, books, software are extremely low. In fact, I would not be surprised if the distribution of these things actually INCREASES the sales! Many years ago, before Microsoft made it impossible to sell software without submitting the source code to them to certify (aka steal) I worked with another guy to sell our own software. There were virtually no sales, until we started giving it away for people to use. The catch was, they could not use it for free without being nagged to purchase it. Purchasing it gave them a unique code to disable the nagging.
There are a tiny number of people - lets call them "copyright trolls" who aggressively find out who is doing what, but they don't do anything about it! What they do is go various companies and SELL them the data of who is doing what. That data is pretty worthless mainly because most of the data is FAKE - generated by the companies that are the trolls.
Likewise, anti-malware, anti-virus companies are frauds. They are the creators of the new malware and viruses. Other people copy their viruses, often unintentionally. Those companies would be out of business very quickly if there were not constantly new malware and viruses for them to magically have the solution for, even before those viruses and malware have propagated through the internet.
If you want to find the criminals behind illicit activity, look for whoever is making money out of it.
It goes back to the old Charlie Chaplin silent movie "The Kid" Charlie has a business selling windows. That's a very tough way to earn a living. However he has a little boy throwing bricks at people's windows - creating customers for Charlie.
There are loads of internet sites which charge hefty subscription fees to access their sites. In fact, they are quite tricky about it. They set up dozens of clone sites, each with it's own monthly subscription fees, and each site has a unique selection of titles. Rarely do 2 subscription sites have the SAME titles, because they are the same company, and they want you to buy multiple subscriptions. These companies sure don't like TPB, etc. because that allows people to get what they want without paying those subscriptions. It goes eve further. A lot of these subscription sites do something like this. They say "Free, just pay $1 with your credit card to verify your identity". They then bill your card $1. and then monthly charges start popping up. They will say "oh, you should have cancelled your free trial" but it was either impossible to cancel the free trial, or even if you did, the charges start up again a month later.
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