MY TAKE
MY THOUGHTS ON THE ISSUE
On this page you will find a couple of "big" thoughts that connect this issue to my personal life and my career going forward.
Convienence and Consequence
These two words summarize my opinion on piracy. Downloading pirated media and other materials from the internet has become an extremely convenience process in the past 5-10 years. It's much easier for anyone to download a music album than to drive to the mall and buy one. It's also cheaper! Personally I have tried to stay away from downloading illegal music my entire life. My parents always encouraged and taught me that downloading music for free was illegal, and I am pretty obedient, so most of my middle-senior years I did not download one piece of illegal music. Later in high school as I discovered how easy it was to get free music, I started to download it in small bunches, never a large quantity, and never via a P2P program. I still try to access music in a legal manner as much as I possibly can. This is maybe because I have been educated musically and understand the hard work artists have to put into their music in order to produce an amazing product. Another reason why I think most youth start to pirate media is because there is a lack of consequence. Sure, their may be actions taken by copyright holders to companies that make pirated media easily available to others, but even then the law suits that actually result in fines is minimal. If youth were handed serious fines every time they downloaded illegal content then maybe pirating would stop? Unfortunately it's happening too rapidly and over the internet, which is hard to track, it would cost outrageous amounts of legal fees to charge every single person in this country that is committing copyright infringement. Overall I think convenience and consequence have a big part to play in the reason piracy occurs over the internet at such a rapid level in today's society.
Value
Another reason why I think piracy is so popular in today's society is because the value individuals place on the items they are pirating and stealing is low. My point is that because of the emergence of digital media and the ability to share movies, music, books and software via computers and internet, society has forgotten the amount of time and money put into this easily accessible media. A simple 4 min song that is played hundreds of times on a local hit music station is something the world takes for granted, because it's short, it's always on the radio, it's free to listen to on Youtube, and it's probably accessible free via a P2P sharing program. I believe that the majority of society takes music and movies (less so movies because of the varying size and length of the average piece) as part of their every day life they can access for free. They don't think about (me included) the amount of effort and money put into the production of this media. In order to even try to curve piracy and illegal downloading the value of the 4 min audio file has to be changed in the minds of people today.
We're Living
Despite the dramatic drop in music and movie sales because of piracy and illegal downloading of media on the internet, these two industries have given up filling large law suits and found ways to adapt. For example, the emergence of monitization of "free" views of video and music. Ads on Youtube videos have steadily grown since YouTube's creation. Services like "Songza" are providing a small amount of money to artists every time their track is listened to by viewers. Songza is making money through ads. HMV, a company that's bottom line was music CD sales has diversified their business model to include sales of DVD movies, books related to movies and music, accessories, and clothing. Small things like this are changing the way we access media and materials via the internet but if the industries can adapt and people can find ways to value the media they take for granted, the music, movie, book and software industries will continue to survive and might even thrive.
I hope you have enjoyed this website.