Com125 Assignment3: 'Music Downloading; Sharing? or Stealing?'

Since MP3 becomes to play an important role for majority people’s daily lives, filesharing issue became a controversial matter. On one side, file sharing is not necessarily illegal . On the other side is focused on issues predominant proportion of material shared subject to copyright. Napster, Kazaa, iTune, UGRE, Spiralfrog and Qtax are well known existing websites for downloading audio files on the web. Internet users can access and download all various genres of music at home sitting down in front of the computer, instead of going to music store and looking for a CD. Since there are numerous music downloading websites are available, this topic is worthwhile to discuss about. In recent days, it has become a necessarily significant issue to think about if music downloading can be regarded as sharing files, or stealing copyright in the virtual network society.

What is music downloading?

Music downloading can be defined that it refers to the transferring of a music file from an internet facing computer or website to a user’s local computer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_downloading). Lately, it is so common to download song files to our personal computers and store them in MP3 players. We can get songs for free. Music downloading encompasses both meanings of legal downloads and downloads of material without permission or payment which people break copyright laws. Most of people like music thus; music downloading was started from the concept of file sharing based on peer-to-peer networks.

Music downloading: Copyright infringement

Copyright infringement is the unauthorized use of approved files which is covered by copyright law, in a manner that breaks one of the original copyright owner's exclusive rights, such as the right to reproduce or perform the copyrighted work, or to make copied material that build upon it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement).

There are many cases of copyright infringement globally. It has been brought up in many different countries such as the US, the UK, Australia, South Korea, China and Japan. Copyright infringement became an issue about all countries who has the internet access for people. In 2006, South Korea, the most popular music download website called, ‘Monkey3’ was sued by the Association of Korean music producers and singers for providing free music files to download. It was a shock among young people especially, due to no more free music downloading access. However, what people did was looking for other websites offering free audio file downloads. The internet is unlimited information storage, and there exists billions of URLs that people can access anytime. At the end, more free music downloading websites were sued after ‘Monkey3’ was charged for their illegal music downloading offers. Once ‘Monkey3’ had to change their policy to download music files to charge for the songs using online cash. Since this change, ‘Monkey3’ have lost quite a number of users, and now they charge only for new released songs, not the entire audio file downloads.

According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), illegal music downloading can damage the music industry and a series of law suits led to many of these networks being closed down. In the US, the illegal downloading of music from the internet websites has influenced music industry billions of dollars loss in revenues to publishers and artists. This fact shows how the music downloading can be an inevitable economical threat to music industry. The linked webpage below shows a great moving image called 'Fighting Music Piracy'.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=vEkhkBGnrYo

Music Downloading: Ethics of sharing files

“I think it’s OK to download files from the Net, even it is illegal.”( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_file_sharing). According to a poll, 75% of young voters in Sweden (ages 18-20), support file sharing, even if it's illegal. Ethics of file sharing is a subfield of ethics specifically relating to the ethical implications of file sharing over computer networks and the internet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_file_sharing). Though the internet network, people can share files by downloading visual and audio files which are copyrighted and non-copyrighted to each other. One of the popular peer-to-peer file sharing websites called Kazaa became legal after paying a $100 million in reparations to the recording industry. It still offers a download on its official website for Kazaa 3.25 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazaa#Current_state). There are many file sharing advocates are out there and they see free music downloads are a part of consumer culture to have a sample before getting an original product. Through downloading music files, people can reach the music artists easily and get to know more about them and their music. Also, from the downloaded music over the internet, people can start feeling interested in certain songs and become a fan of the artists. Overall, music downloading can activate the music industry not only nationally, but also globally. Me as one of the file sharing advocates, downloading music files for free from the internet is an inevitable phenomenon in the technological society. Normally, the files available on the web free do not offer a full quality of the music. People who want an original product will go out and buy the full legal product with all great bonus features. Therefore, downloading free music files on the net is about freedom for the internet users over the peer-to-peer networks.


Referece:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=vEkhkBGnrYo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_downloading
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_file_sharing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazaa#Current_state