Copyright Violations

The most common form of copyright violations I see is in file sharing. Constantly people are asking me to put music onto their iPod, lend them a CD to rip/copy to their computer, and various other things. We discussed in class all of the ways that music sharing is illegal, even in the sense of playing a CD at a party without securing the rights. This seems pretty ridiculous to me, especially when the artists imply that money is not the motivation behind their copyright fiending.

Music is a form of art, hence why they are called "artists", and for artists in other mediums it's more of a struggle for them. They pride themselves in their form of file sharing with websites such as deviantart, flickr, and various others. They just put a simple watermark or some sort of signature so if someone was to use the image, it's automatically given credit. Music has something similar, with the id3 tag of the mp3 file, but rather than embrace that their music is getting out for free to many people who would never have heard the music, they become money hungry and began the lawsuits.

Another thing that is ridiculous about the legality of filesharing and license agreements is the double standard. This is expressed perfectly in this link, where the author discusses that when you purchase a CD you are purchasing a license agreement as well. So you cannot distribute the CD in anyway possible. This comes in outlets such as online, playing it at a party (as we discussed in class), etc. But when your CD becomes scratched and irreparable, the license agreement becomes irrelevant and you cannot obtain a free physical or digital copy, which would make sense upon purchasing such an agreement. (Please visit the link for a more indepth discussion).

When it comes down to it, the muscians who are worried about pirating are making the majority of their profits from touring, merchandise, and various contracts outside of music. The fact that they want to squeeze every penny out of consumers is ridiculous and they will never get my support for such a thing.