The acceptability of P2P took another big step forward over the weekend, as accounts claiming to be ‘the official profile for NIN’ appeared on a number of torrent sites, including The Pirate Bay and the private trackers What.cd and Waffles.fm. NIN has now confirmed that these accounts indeed belong to the band.
(from TorrentFreek)

and
Nine Inch Nails Sells Out Of $300 Deluxe Edition In Under Two Days
(Techdirt)

Yeah right. The RIAA have been illegally colluding over prices, ripping off artists and consumers alike, for decades. The whole concept of copyright is an artificial, anti-capitalist, anti-free trade construct originally created to protect publishers - not creators - and then extended and twisted over the years into an utter joke.

The record industry is obsolete; they’ve had a good run through the 20th century and managed to exploit technology in ways that allowed them to make money from the creativity of others in ways that would were impossible prior to those technologies coming into place. Now technology has moved on further and made them obsolete. Audio recording and engineering equipment is comparatively inexpensive these days, and the Internet provides a marketing and distribution channel - creators can self-produce without artistic compromise, then communicate directly with their fanbase without middlemen unfairly profiting off both parties. In some sense, it’s almost a return to the state prior to recordable media and the ensuing record industry.

Legal and fair online digital distribution of media and entertainment has been around for years and this whole issue now rests on whether a just society can allow the taking without paying of product that is intended for sale. The world’s governments will see to it that the promise of online commerce and digital distribution is not lost to a band of online pirates and that, at the end of the day, is the point. Real fans of music, movies and books online have always put their money where their mouth is and still do.