Internet piracy law

If you think that piracy started with the Internet, then you are wrong. Remember the old days, where we all taped songs played on the radio and made cassettes with music we liked? There was no problem borrowing a few records (yes, the old vinyl Frisbees) from friends and making a mix tape with all possible favourites. That was copyright infringement just the same, but was largely ignored by the record companies, the RIAA, MPAA and other such organisations that are now indicting the widespread digital equivalent, the mp3. For that reason, an Internet piracy law was imposed upon all countries that would like to participate in world trade.
But does this Internet piracy law make sense? We used to make tapes of the records, back in the days, but we did go out and buy the ones we really liked. It is not much different now; many people would like to preview the music on the CD before they buy the disc. The employed practice by the record companies to put one good song on the CD with plenty of bad ones killed the enthusiasm of many music lovers, so naturally people stopped buying unknown hyped up products and chose to download the album first, in a “try before buy” effort. This lead to dropping sales, so the companies, instead of going back to their roots and publishing better records, decided to sue everybody and everything and force the creation of the Internet piracy law. The lawyers were on retainer anyway. So the Internet piracy law is just another helping tool for the huge companies to extract money out of the public? Not quite. Realistically speaking, there are people who make bootleg copies of discs and DVDs and sell them for a much lesser price on the street. But instead of focusing their attention on such pirates for profit, the RIAA, MPAA and similar agencies prosecuted each and every Internet piracy law breaker, including an 80 year old grandmother and a twelve year old kid.
Is piracy that bad? Some people did use the pirate networks to distribute their own product and create a “viral” effect. John Cusack and his team, who produced the movie “War, Inc.”, after failing to land a worldwide distribution deal for their movie which is very critical of the war in Iraq, apparently released an impeccable DVD screener through these channels. The movie is in self-distribution and still in the theatres, running strong. The napster network distributed the Madonna song “Music” before it was released, resulting in significantly increased sales of her CD, despite the fact that everyone already heard the song. Besides the obvious question, where did they get the pre-release mp3 from, there is also the confirmed promotional effect to this underground distribution network.