The future of music/videos is unpredictable – meaning that music/video piracy will continue until they either become free or impossible to pirate.

Free: When content owners start selling to other companies (e.g. Yahoo!) instead of consumers

Impossible: When software piracy becomes impossible. The only tools used to pirate music or videos are software.
If you’re somebody who intends to profit from music/videos, you’ll find it very hard.

This may be of interest to you and others…

First of all, Apple did not create iTunes to reduce piracy, but merely to increase the sales of their iPods. They wanted to make music and videos readily available to people who own iPods. iPods sales are driven by the availability of music/videos. You could say that Apple are actually in favour of music/video piracy because they will be played on iPods.

therefore my verdict is that there is no ‘islamic piracy’, do u think the people who sang nasheeds in the prophets time asked for money, no. Quite frankly i think they would be appalled that we are doing it now.

Muslims in general are among the middle to lower class in economics, meaning the concept of buying software and music is very rare to find.

And also, the record industry as suffered horribly due to piracy. iTunes has done well, but not even remotely enough to curb lowered CD sales.

If a person really wants to make money out of a DVD (especially when it comes to Islam), they should put advertising into the DVD and distribute it free, similar to a magazine.

Theres no way to stop Muslims from pirating. Asia is the highest pirated place in the world, and the majority of Muslims who buy this stuff are of Asian decent.

I have a Muslim rock band in Austin and we would never sell our music (profit off the prophet? no way). But, we do make money from merchandise and gigs, which we use not for ourselves but to buy equipment to make our sound better.

On a side note, I know you closed the post, but one I saw the headline for the lead NYT article today, I couldn’t help but chuckle and think to myself “Man, everyone is changing madhabs these days”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/22/world/middleeast/22prexy.html?_r=1&hp&or

LOL oh man that was hilarious! hahahaha

I agree that distributors and individuals engaged in da3wa need to earn a living and protect their rights, however opening a Muslim iTunes, while seemingly a practical solution to this problem, merely masks the issue and can even open the door to new problems for the end-user. Check out what Sheikh Ul-Internet says about DRM (Digital Rights Management):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management#Controversy

On a side note, I know you closed the post, but one I saw the headline for the lead NYT article today, I couldn’t help but chuckle and think to myself “Man, everyone is changing madhabs these days”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/22/world/middleeast/22prexy.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Everyone knows and trusts the name so it would be easy to just piggyback their success. Also, think of the da’wah!

Plus, it’s an awesome way to kind of work ourselves more into the mainstream =)