Fifth Blog: Music Downloading

            During this week’s readings and class discussions revolved around piracy. In Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture: the Nature and Future of Creativity Lessig claims that the most commercial piracy is “the unauthorized taking of other people’s content within a commercial context”. In the past 10 or 15 years, technology has made it incredibly easy to pirate music, video, computer applications and even books. Many people now share mp3 files with each other instead of paying for them either by buying a CD or by purchasing it online. Lessig claims that there are four different types of file sharers. Type A is “someone who use sharing networks and substitutes for purchasing content” also known as someone who downloads instead of purchasing the product. Type B file sharers “are some who use sharing networks to sample music before purchasing it”. Type C, on the other hand, are sharers who “get access to copyrighted content that is no longer sold or that they would not have purchased because the transaction costs off the Net are too high”. And finally type D who “use sharing networks to get access to content that is not copyrighted or that the copyright owner wants to give away.” Type A sharers are is the only type that could be considered harmful. And even though B and C are technically illegal they actually are good for society because it can often give exposure to music that is not mainstream or well known. And D type music sharing is completely legal.

            Lessig gives a great example of how inconsistent the United States is with copyright and piracy laws by comparing it to used book and record stores to the definition of piracy. As many of you may know, used book and record stores buy content from people, then in return they resell the content. “Under American copyright law, when they buy and sell this content, even if the content is still under copyright, the copyright owner doesn’t get a time” but used book and record stores are commercial entities. The only difference between file sharing and a used bookstore is that the file sharer is not making any profit off of the files they share. So why is music downloading so much bigger of a deal than it needs to be?

            Lots of people think that piracy is a bad thing and claim that they have never pirated music or taken pirated music. Yet this is most likely not true. Even a burned mixed CD given to you by a friend is technically pirated material. I definitely have pirated music during my time on the Internet. I have had many different reasons for pirating music in the past. One time my hard drive crashed on my computer and I lost hundreds of dollars of purchased music that the computer store offered one thousand dollars to get back. I decided that I would rather illegally download all of my music back rather than pay for it all again. I have also illegally downloaded foreign music or music that was not available on iTunes or that I could find in the United States. I also have commonly downloaded something by an artist only to buy more of their music later. So by definition I am a type B and C file sharer. I personally have done this multiple different times with different musical artists. For example, my friend file shared me a few Homestuck albums for me to listen to a few months ago. After listening to the albums I decided that I really liked them. So when new albums come out on their website, I purchase it because I want to give the Homestuck music team credit and my business. Another friend shared some My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic music remixes with me and I now purchase it unless free downloading is an option. If file sharing had not happened I would not have known about many of the music artists that I now have on my iTunes. Because of file sharing those artists are now getting more popular and therefore are making more money in the long run even though people are still illegally downloading their music.  

If interested here is the Homestuck music website.