well, this is more about music and video that gets downloaded, than it is about citing information from a site. I discuss this with my students frequently, and most don't understand that they are stealing from the artist(also from the publisher...) when they download mp3's.


What? You mention the artist? That's the one part of the equation the RIAA overlooks. I agree completely that the rampant P2P filesharing is threatening artists' livelihoods, and don't even have P2P software on my PC. What sticks in my gullet about the RIAA's crusade, though, is that it has nothing to do with rewarding artists for their creative ndeavours, and every thing to do with enriching bloated corporations devoid of any creativity. The large number of recording artists opposed to the RIAA's campaign is a good indicator of this. I've also heard good things about Apple's new iTunes initiative. What scares the RIAA is, not the idea of performing artists not getting paid for their work (there are ways for downloaders to pay the artist directly), it's the idea of its member companies losing their overly large slice of that pie. </rant>


P.S. The above rant is not entirely unrelated to words, either. The corporate stooges in the legislative and judicial branches of the US government have also voted to extend copyright yet again, which will impact on the distribution and copying of works that ought to be in the puublic domain by now.