Now as many of us know we have Copyright laws, so first and foremost speaking from an ethically view point, we should abide by the law. People downloading off the internet illegally are a real concern to entertainers and the industry as a whole. So many people are doing it the industry is losing money. To put this in perspective, there is "12.5 billion dollars in economic losses each year due to piracy in the music industry (go-gulf.com)." But it is said that about 95% of music that people obtain is downloaded online illegally. The statistics show that the industry is suffering from piracy. Now there’s obviously more than one way to obtain music, maybe your friend downloaded it online and wants to share it with you. That’s called peer-to-peer (p2p) filing sharing. When the first P2P software emerged in 1999, “music sales in the U.S. have dropped 47 percent, from $14.6 billion to $7.7 billion (riaa.com).”
To really make you think a little more let me share this with you, along with the 12.5 billion dollars in losses “71,060 U.S. jobs lost, a loss of $2.7 billion in workers' earnings, and a loss of $422 million in tax revenues, $291 million in personal income tax and $131 million in lost corporate income and production taxes (ipi.org).” So downloading music might seem harmless but in the big picture there really is a huge impact on our society, who would have thought?
Now there’s always an opposing side to a public argument, there are people that believe downloading music should be legal. We the people should have freedom to obtain music whenever we want, some might say. “This is the internet age. Once content goes up, it's free for everyone...Just the way it goes. It's not an argument of ethics, but of availability (debate.org).” This point of view talks about availability and how accessible music is. There’s hundreds if not thousands of sites that file share and allow people to obtain this “illegal” music. So if there’s laws about music piracy, why are there so many ways around it? If it was really that big of an issue wouldn’t you think someone would step in and try to fix the problem?
Works Cited
"Online Piracy in Numbers - Facts and Statistics [Infographic]." Web Design Dubai Dubai Web Design and Web Application Development Company. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 Oct. 2013.
"Should Downloading Music Be Legal?" The Premier Online Debate Website. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 Oct. 2013.
"The True Cost of Sound Recording Piracy to the U.S. Economy IPI Issues Institute for Policy Innovation." The True Cost of Sound Recording Piracy to the U.S. Economy IPI Issues Institute for Policy Innovation. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 Oct. 2013.
"Writing Report Default." Http://www.riaa.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 Oct. 2013.
Yes, technological advances have made it easy to pirate, share, distribute music without purchasing it. The recording industry and individual bands have had to deal with this new reality - and obviously, the "cat is out of the bag" so to speak, and smart folks with computers will always figure out new ways to avoid fees or costs. That being said, the vast majority of the public now agrees to spend the monthly "subscription" cost to avoid attracting attention as well as to make sure that the files they download are actually the music they want - and not some sort of virus or malignant download. This seems to be the ebb and flow of the modern music industry in the age of computers. Corporations like Apple have made it so cheap and easy to get iTunes, why would anyone want to pirate music?
ReplyDeleteBe careful of setting up a "straw man" as a way to analyze an argument. Your entire final paragraph is an example of the straw man fallacy - "some might say" and other phrases of this sort ("there are people," "...the argument goes," etc.) are often used by media interviewers to assert a hypothetical and force an answer (for instance, a reporter can say "some might say that you are lying here.... are you?" and thus avoid personal accountability for a tough question). The idea here was to find and analyze actual arguments in an objective way - and frankly, I would like to see an argument in favor of free music (bands can sell tickets - but I guess all those recording executives might miss out on their middle-man salaries....). The purpose of our class is to become proficient in recognizing how persuasive tactics are being used, not merely to investigate the rationale behind different positions. Keep working!