Lies, lies, and damned falsified statistics

@ Robert: "The millions of dollars a year companies lose to pirated copyrighted material" don't exist, at least not losses to users sharing files. Those people were never going to buy the DVDs or CDs anyway (or, for those who might, they are going to go do that *in addition* to downloading the files; sharing is used by that sort of people as a "sampling" service, to help them decide which to buy and which to ignore).

The only *real* losses sustained are due to high-volume disk-duplication operations, selling pirated knock-offs of the "real" DVDs/CDs (usually in the Far East). It is arguable whether the losses in this case are the retail price of the number of disks sold (had they been legitimate), or the actual amount spent by consumers on knock-offs. I'd vote towards the latter.