Lets just say the music industry estimates that 400 squillion illegal files have been shared over the Internet and that ever last one of those files represents a lost sale to the industry. That would make music about the most profitable business since slavery. However, for the same reasons, the music industry has seen not a vast increase in its income, but a net loss of around 6% a year for the last few years.

The psychological problems here are vast; these guys are comparing where they are with where they know they should be if weren't for all the pirates.

Now any sensible person (note: illegal rhetorical device) will realise that many of the files being shared were never going to replace sales anyway. Partly because it would entail the music business growing at unprecedented rates, but mostly because the people listening to them, if they had to pay for them, wouldn't listen, or couldn't afford to listen.

But now ARIA, the Australian equivalent has started talking some genuine economic sense in this piece in the SMH (expires)

While Australian music sales dropped last year, the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) concedes that online song-swapping and CD burning may not be to blame.

Nature Magazine reports that "The parasite that causes sleeping sickness once swallowed a plant, say researchers. They have found plant-like genes in the organism, suggesting that drugs based on herbicides might be able to kill it."

At least as interesting however, is the last paragraph which says "The finding shows how easy it is for microbes to mix and match genes from different sources for different uses, says evolutionary biologist Miklos Muller of Rockefeller University in New York."

So releasing altered genes into the biosphere not only makes it possible for unpredicted transfer to other life forms, given the engineering of living things, it starts to look pretty well certain.