The Enrons of the Music World, and Moore Was A Punk

On the list of things we "know" which turn out to be shit, let's add the "fact" that file-sharing has hurt music sales. Matthew Yglesias has more, via Slapnose.

As some of you may know, one of the things that continually mystifies me is the decreasing cost of computer memory. Sometime in the next month I'm probably going to upgrade my computer, and when I do I'll have a 40 gig hard drive I won't have a use for. The only thing I can think to do is buy a mount and make it a removable drive. Now, in my case that will mean an iPod's worth of storage I can in theory just tote around swap files with friends. But the trend is of course wider than that. CD burners are already standard, and in a few years DVD burners will be too. In the meantime, people will probably be able to afford 5gb flash keychains and so on. So even if the music industry manages to kill P2P filesharing, they've got a bigger problem. Basically, copyright infringement is going to be the new pot: Illegal, but also ubiquitous, undetectable and essentially unstoppable.

I almost feel sorry for them. But that's what you get for trying to fight Less's Law. Less's Law states that Hard Drive prices fall faster than transistor prices, something we don't often think about but is starting to get ridiculous. As in, ridiculously great. Welcome to the world of Terabyte-drives for the home PC.