Piracy is a serious problem but how many
of you actually know of the consequences you face if caught committing this
crime? The most severe punishment is anywhere from five years in jail, up to
two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in fines and a felony on your record
(RIAA). At some point in time most of us have committed some form of piracy
whether it is downloading music illegally with sites such as Limewire or Napster,
watching movies currently in theaters with the drop box app, or even something
as simple as burning a CD and giving it to friends. These are all examples of
piracy and each time someone downloads a song from Limewire the artist and all
those who worked to create the song are losing money. We’ve all thought to
ourselves, it’s only one song it won’t make that big of a difference but when
millions of other people have the same mindset it adds up.
It may all seem harmless at the time but
piracy contributes to about twelve billion dollars in losses and not only is
there money losses but also lost jobs and lost wages which was discovered by
research done by the Institute for Policy Innovation (RIAA). As much as it
hurts to pay $1.29 plus tax for a song on ITunes that seems like a lot better
than thousands of dollars in fines if convicted. So you may ask yourself what
you can and cannot do when it comes to music and downloading, there are sites
that the owner of the music gives permission to allow downloading of their
songs whether with a fee or not, it is ok to copy/burn CDs as long as you don’t
give the burned copy to anyone else, this even includes simply lending a CD to
someone. We have to remember we wouldn’t want someone stealing from us so we
shouldn’t be stealing either. Below is a link to a great short video on the
price of piracy.
RIAA.
"What Is Online Piracy?" Http://www.riaa.com. N.p., n.d. Web.
07 Sept. 2013.
I remember the good ol' days of limewire, napster, and other file sharing sites. Now that those sites are down, paying for music does sometimes stink. Online piracy is an everyday occurrence despite the high penalties if you are caught. Although fee music is nice, I do like to buy album for artists that I enjoy listening to because, at the end of the day, that's their career and how they make their living. I thought it was interesting that over the weekend the new Drake album was leaked via Twitter. It seems like these days it is guaranteed that an album will be leaked online before it is officially released.
ReplyDeleteI do agree that online piracy occurs often and it occurs daily. Since taking down LimeWire and all those music sites I feel like the big problem with piracy has now moved to movies and TV shows. I remember reading an article recently where the creators of the show Game of Thrones were saying they were honored that their show was the number one illegally downloaded show at one time, I think it had about one hundred thousand downloads for the season finale in something like an hour or two. They said that the show did well enough that they weren't worried about the piracy which was pretty crazy to me that they were condoning it but hey more power to them. I do agree though the artists do make a living off of this music however ITunes since it mainly has control over music seems to be taking advantage with their rising prices and I don't want to say forcing but probably adding to people illegally downloading. For the deluxe version of The Great Gatsby soundtrack it was around $16-$18 which is crazy and the fact they make some songs album only is frustrating forcing you to get all these songs you may not necessarily want.
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