Ahoy Maties!
Ready to sail, pillage, plunder, rifle and loot? There is a crime we are all guilty of: Music Piracy. It has been around for decades and for me, this is an unstoppable problem. So far, all attempts to cease piracy in the world seem to be refrained by technology advances, which facilitate the exchange of copyrighted material by free means.
Downloading music from the internet, sharing any copyrighted file with your friends or making a digital back-up of your albums are serious crimes. As some old commercials tried to teach us…it is as severe as stealing a CD from the music store and…you can walk the plank for that!The most affected companies have taken actions to reduce their losses due to piracy. Virgin Media is planning to use the software Cview, which allows it to analyze the activity of customers in the Internet, to search for illegal sharing of files using peer-to-peer sites. In the other hand, Apple is using DRM software (Digital Rights Management - Savvy?) to control the number of times you can copy a music file in different computers, limiting this to five times per file.
Are these actions against our legal rights to privacy arrrgh?! Sure they are...but they are the fastest solutions. The ideal scenario is to create a social aversion towards piracy, the same we have against robbery, murder, fraud and other serious crimes. We are not ready to weigh anchor though. For now, more severe restrictions are necessary to maintain the global music industry, along with a real and continuous education campaign.
Hi Paola,
ReplyDeleteI agree with you in many things. The first is that definitively all of us are guilty of copying, sharing or transmitting a song without the proper permission, at least once in our life. Second, now the music industry is taking action about what we, the internet user, can’t control. Those companies are losing millions because every second somebody around the world is doing an illegal copy of a song. What Virgin Media and Apple are doing is desperate reaction in order to protect their most valuable assets: their original compositions. I think that those companies are tired of seeing how the laws are inefficient in how to deal with piracy. And the last one is that we, as consumers, need to develop a consciousness about all the damage that we can create when we pirated music.
Although piracy can be reduced, I think there will never be a complete solution, be it music or software piracy. Even if anti-piracy technology and legislation were efficient, illegal sharing of music will not be stopped everywhere in the world. We all know there are cultures in which individual property, thoughts and art (including music) are believed to be a common (and shareable) part of society. So unless we change everyone’s way to think towards intellectual property, there is no way out.
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