Chapter 5: Piracy

Personally, I think it is a bit ridiculous how the music industry gets so worked up over all different types of piracy, even including file sharing. In my opinion, the CD sales did not decrease significantly because of illegal downloading sites, they CD sales decreased because of the advancement of technology and all of the alternative, faster ways to obtain music other than buying a CD. For example, the invention of the iPod wiped out CD sales because people no longer needed to go to the store to purchase an entire CD, many times with only a select few songs they like on it, when they could just purchase the songs of their choice on iTunes. Instead of paying $15 dollars for a CD up front, people now have the option to pay 99 cents in different time frames for the songs they enjoy listening to. In the chapter, of is argued that the MPAA has lost $4.6 billion dollars because of physical piracy, and $3 billion dollars because of world wide piracy. However, how can they lose that money if it was never given to them in the first place? It would be a different story if we physically and deliberately stole $4.6 billion dollars from a major corporation, but we didn't. Downloading an MP3 track is not the same as robbing a bank. In the defense of the people, we do not download music to spite the music industry because our intentions are for them to lose money, we download music because we simply enjoy hearing it. If an artist did not intend on letting their music be exposed to the public, with the risk of it being pirated, then they should not have exposed it in the first place. There is a significant difference in stealing a CD and downloading a song.

Piracy has actually been very beneficial to many. When people are file sharing music, technically they are making the artist more popular and recognizable to the rest of society. Free data-base sites are used in universities so that students can access them, but also become dependent on them later in their career. Then, they must pay subscription fees to access the site. This benefits the data-base sites because people would not know about them if they never got the chance to experience them. Who would make a purchase without making sure the product is reliable and beneficial to their life? Nobody. The industry feels that if technology is banned and regulated, it will be harder to commit the act of piracy. This is true, they can ban whatever they want and regulate what we can and cannot access, but in the long run the only people they are hurting is themselves. If technology is banned and regulated how could the people even discover new artists, increase recognition of artists, or even be aware that the artists exist? It would be impossible. We benefit every day from piracy, considering our nation was built on it.