Personally, I like the K app. But I would never use it at work. At home it’s fine, but then I am savvy enuf to watch out for it doing dumb stuff, like installing stuff (spyware) that I don’t want. If you get it, watch your registry’s Run keys for anything new popping up! If you don’t know what that means, either don’t get it or be very, very careful.
As for the moral issue, two wrongs may not make a right, but I am personally sick of the way various media industries screw over their performers and consumers as much as they can get away with. They’re still charging $10-15 or more for CD’s that anybody with a burner can tell you don’t cost near that much. Yes, I know there has to be a markup. I also know that they use a higher quality CD, but if we can get the cheap ones for less than a dollar in 2 digit quantities, I can only imagine that the high quality ones are even cheaper in the 7 digit and higher quantities that they buy them at.
DVD’s may not be as cheap, but I’m personally betting that in the kind of quantity the producers get them at their cost isn’t too far off from a CD, but we’re still paying sometimes as much as $30 for a single DVD. Compare the cost of a movie that comes on a single DVD to one that comes with 2 DVDs and you’ll find the cost is not doubled (or halved, depending on the direction you take it) as it should be. The production cost is still likely to be at most $1-2 per DVD (educated guess) even after taking into account distribution. They’re making an obscene profit…
Having said that, I personally don’t dl a lot of movies as I like the features you get with a DVD and I prefer to watch movies on my big screen TV anyway. But I certainly don’t feel any sympathy for the RIAA or MPAA.
As a final note, it’s been demonstrated that if the media industries would simply adopt the new technologies, they could make plenty of dough still. The porn industry adopted the internet pretty much from the beginning, and they rake in huge amounts of money. The “evil” Kazaa even has a feature to get paid-for content that sees the money go back to the content’s distributor, and people are using it.
The media industries need to stop bitching and moaning every time some new technology pops up that might damage their profits a little. Rather than trying to make it illegal or difficult, they need to find a way to adopt and profit it from it. Napter’s kin is not going away anytime soon. Even if they shut down Kazaa (unlikely at best), there’ll be something to take its place. Always.