File Sharing

File Sharing
I probably covered some of this in my “shoplifting” blog but anyway. The other day some people who ran a big file sharing site were put in jail for a year
and probably technically what they were doing was illegal, but is morally wrong?
Okay, however rich you are no one likes to be robbed, and in theory file sharing is stealing money from the artists and movie stars; whenever you download something for free someone doesn’t get an extra pound or whatever, I don’t know. As the advert on video piracy says “you wouldn’t steal a car,” which is probably true, I wouldn’t steal a car, but it’s a totally different thing, and in a way by overcharging consumers for years the music/movie industry has been stealing from us.
I think that everyone would be a lot more sympathetic if the people who are allegedly being “stolen from” were a lot less rich already. I’ve lost count of the amount of mansions on the MTV show “Cribs” that pop stars have, they show everyone around their “collection of classic cars” or their wardrobe full of designer clothes which is bigger than my house. I think if they didn’t have so much money then we would feel better about giving them out hard earned cash. Why should we give our money which we have actually worked for, to a millionaire who doesn’t need it?
I think that really what the music industry is scared of is that their artists will have to actually work on tours and decent songs before people will buy them. They know that they have been churning out commercial songs which pretty much all sound the same for years and now maybe people want things with more substance before they will purchase them. Although I think there’s a difference between downloading songs for free from some major label band and taking for free from a smaller band who are still trying to make their way.
Despite saying this I actually don’t use file sharing sites because of viruses and that, I pay for the music/movies that I get from iTunes, although recently iTunes have increased the prices of one of their tracks from 79p to 99p, and even though it’s not actually that much of an increase I doubt that it’s doing anything to convince people not to use file sharing sites.

Mariah Carey on Cribs


A Song about file sharing


References
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/news/2009/04/090417_pirate_bay_nh_sl.shtml
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/08/amazon-itunes-music-downlads-mp3