[jamesmcn]

> Sure, though the same can be said for drug cartels too.

Perhaps. Nils Gilman argues that increasing the risk of a transaction increases the reward, and backs it up with drug-war data.

http://longnow.org/seminars/02010/may/03/deviant-globalizati...

The difference is that drugs are physical goods that require nontrivial infrastructure to produce. Digital media is essentially free to reproduce, and very cheap to distribute. Instituting the death penalty for trading Metallica's songs is unlikely to drive the price of a bootleg copy of the black album into the tens of thousands of dollars.