Article: EFFORTS TO CURB ILLEGAL DOWNLOADING COPYRIGHTED MUSIC
Statement of Mr. Mitch Bainwol, Chairman and CEO Recording Industry Association of America, Committee on Senate Judiciary

Mr. Mitch Bainwol discusses how downloading music illegally can hurt the company and the economy. It explains how it effects the music industry and its clients when we download illegally. We all love music. We listen to it at home. But lately there's been lots of noise about music, how we get it and what we do with it.

As you know, the music industry has been devastated by worldwide piracy.
Record labels are particularly vulnerable because they are dependent upon a single source of revenue - sales of recorded music.

In theory, if a person is able to download his or her favorite music off the Internet, that person would not need to purchase the CD at a local music store. The most common average of numbers seems to sit around a loss of 20 percent globally in sales since 1999.
The music industry and even some musicians who feel they are taking a loss due to the sharing of their copy-protected works online have started fighting back, so to speak. In recent months there have been more cases of music piracy heading to the courts.
What I want to know is why there are so many lawful issues surrounding the downloading of music? You might wonder why we have such an influx of MP3 players, CD burners, and even software that allows users to easily rip music from a CD to their computer. They should have done some thinking in how they would be used and how it would effect before they created systems that are used to do stuff that is illegal.