CHRISTINE MATHOT
BACHELOR OF ARTS STUDENT


NEW COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES 1501



Assignment 1 Brief: Academic Essay

Project Outline: Music Downloading Piracy

Workshop Time: Monday 10am – 12pm

Weighting: 20% marks
Length: 1000 words
Due date: Friday 11th May 5pm (End Week 10)



MUSIC DOWNLOADING PIRACY



Most of us would never consider stealing a car. You wouldn’t steal a handbag. You wouldn’t steal a movie. So, is music (and video) piracy stealing? Internet piracy is music compressed, posted and transmitted globally via the internet without permission of the rights holders. ‘Digital copying is as serious and criminal as stealing a CD from a record shop or a DVD from a video shop’ (Moore 2003). Everyday people download tracks off the Internet, simply by opening one of the many peer-to-peer (P2P) file share programs, selecting the tracks, downloading and burning to a CD-ROM. Yet such a simplistic task is a serious offence under the copyright protection laws.


Many illegal downloaders are teenagers and university students who are “money-poor but time-rich”. They install programs such as KaZaA, where you search the internet for songs that somebody else’s computer may have, copy it to your computer and then make your own folder of music to share with other users. Therefore the music industry cannot claim that those downloads were lost record sales, due to the simple fact that they wouldn’t have gone out and bought the songs they downloaded anyway. However the recording industry says that file sharing is detrimental to the future of popular music. People will not pay for something that they can so easily get for free and in turn record companies and musicians won’t profit from their work and may eventually go out of business.

In 2004, Microsoft big cheese Steve "Ballistic" Ballmer reportedly claimed "the most common format of music on an iPod is 'stolen'" (Ballmer 2004). Music piracy has had some serious effects on the recording industry causing the revenue to decline sharply within the last three years due to a 20% drop in sales every year. The use of peer-to-peer files such as KaZaA and Grokster, are responsible for 2.6 billion downloads of copyrighted files every month.


‘With the rise of the computer and the internet, an increasing number of digital products and services have been copied and distributed most of the time without the authorization of legal owners. This trend has become a concern for both product manufacturers and policy makers. A recent illustrations are the legal actions by record companies against file-sharing technologies and their users, backed up by the reinforcement of the copyright law stated in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The main argument of the record companies is the huge revenue losses claimed to be due to Internet piracy’ (Bach 2004).


Many are unaware that the criminal penalties or music piracy can be as high as five years in prison or $250, 000 in fines. It has been brought to the AFM and the RIAA’s (Recording Industry Association of America) attention that music piracy touches on such issues as privacy, copyright infringement, property rights and the evolution of digital media. So Congress has begun to send out music piracy bills. In the Constitution, there is a clause that empowers Congress ‘to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries’ (Article 1, Section 8). This is the basis for patents. The Copyright Act states that only the copyright owner has the right ‘to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords’ (Article 1, Section 6). Here a few factors, people need to be mindful of:
· ‘The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) can sue for as much as $150,000 per song illegally downloaded.
· Almost 2000 individuals have been sued by the RIAA for illegally downloading as of March 2004.
· More than 400 individuals have settled, paying fines averaging $3000.
· The Department of Justice recently announced the creation of the Intellectual Property Task Force, which examines all aspects of how the DOJ handles intellectual property issues’ (CMTA 2004).


The Digital Millennium Copyright Act protects owners from the ‘unauthorised reproduction, adaptation or reproduction of sound recordings, as well as certain digital performances to the public’ (Beal 2004). If you have bought a CD you are allowed to record it to MP3 files for your own use, however once you decide to upload these files in order to share them via P2P, you are committing a serious offence in a breach of the law.

With all the use of these P2P programs, its depriving not only the government of income from sales and excise taxes but also taking away the rights of recording artists, record companies and composers to ‘choose the value of their creative property in a free and open market’ (CRIA 2006). However, some may choose to disagree and believe that illegal downloading may actually be slightly beneficial to the industry. A group the like to call “samplers” where an ‘older crowd who downloads a song or two and then, if they like what they hear, go out and buy the music’ (Silverthorne 2004).

Deliberate infringement of copyright materials is physical music piracy. It is highly illegal and reaps serious consequences if caught. It causes copious amounts of revenue loss within the music and recording industry, due to the fact that if a person is able to download the music they want off the Internet for free, then that person will not go out and buy that CD. Strategic implications need to be sort in order to stop this ongoing piracy. As Cary Sherman, president of Recording Industry Association of America stated: “We want people to stop engaging in the theft of music so that people can go on making it. This is a terrible thing where people are biting the hands that make the music and destroying the very music that they want to continue to be created” (Sherman 2003).




Bibliography

Author - Rafael Rob and Joel Waldfogel
Title - Piracy on the High C's: Music Downloading, Sales Displacement, and Social Welfare in a Sample of College Students,
The Journal of Law and Economics, volume 49 (2006), pages 29–62,
2006, The University of Chicago.


Book – Peitz M, Waelbroeck P. 2003, Piracy of Digital Products: A Critical Review of the Economics Literature, cesifo-group.


Bach D. 2004, The Double Punch of Law and Technology: Fighting Music Piracy or Remaking Copyright in a Digital Age?, Business and Politics: Vol. 6 : Iss. 2, Article 3. Available at: http://www.bepress.com/bap/vol6/iss2/art3


Book – Brown B, Sellen AJ, Geelhoed E. 2001, Music Sharing as a Computer Supported Collaborative Application., Hewlett-Packard, Publishing Systems and Solutions Laboratory

Beal V. 2004, http://www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/Internet/2004/music_downloading.asp


Haines L. 2006, MS in illegal music download shocker, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/02/happy_birthday_outrage


Law and Society Group Blog. 2007, Illegal Music Downloading, http://ledux.blogspot.com/2006/07/illegal-music-downloading.html


Silverthorne S. 2004, Music Download: Pirates or Customers?, http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/4206.html


American Federation of Musicians. 2004, Online Music Piracy, http://www.afm.org/public/departments/leg_issues_05.php


Gruden. 2006, Music Industry Privacy Investigations, http://www.mipi.com.au/musicpiracy.htm



Christian Music Trade Association. 2004, http://www.cmta.com/brochure.htm


Moore C. 2003, Is Music Piracy Stealing?, Applelinks.