Piracy... Arghh

Jason Clark
Blog - Week 12

Internet Piracy

Internet Piracy is the downloading of music, movies, books, or other copyrighted material without the permission of the copyright holder to make another digital copy. Many people have disputed the definition of internet piracy and many argue that downloading music from a peer to peer network is not illegal. This dispute will carry on for a long time to come, but for the present, the unsanctioned download of copyrighted material has been outlawed.

Internet piracy is a problem that affects the movie industry, publishing industry, but especially the music industry. The problem is growing for these other industries, though, due to more of our lives becoming digitized and as high speed internet becomes more common. Piracy pertaining to the music industry especially is not a problem that will ever be solved, in my opinion. There are many ways to regulate which type of files can be shared though which sites and services, but these can be easily beaten. If 100 percent fool proof way to prevent internet piracy were to exist, it would have to monitor every byte of data that is transmitted over every internet connection in every country in the world. This system would have to be able to evaluate whether or not each exchange of data between computers is a legitimate exchange or whether it is illegal. A highly advanced artificial intelligence program would have to be used on every connection in the entire world. Simply, this does not exist and never will exist because there simply is no technology that could sustain this.

I believe the industry will never stop internet piracy. It will however, curb it. With the launch of the Apple iTunes store, the way people downloaded music changed. They were now able to get any single song off an album instead of having to purchase an entire CD. This deterred many people from illegally downloading music because they were willing to spend $.99 on a song that they would have had to spend $12 to buy as part of an album before.

The biggest losers associated with internet piracy will be the record labels. The majority of all album sales go directly to the label. The artist very rarely sees anything from album sales. I don’t believe a huge majority of artists care that their songs are being downloaded for free because they would never see any of the profits from them anyway. It serves as free exposure for the artist.