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Flash back to October, 1997. The punk rockers who call themselves Green Day prepare to release the much anticipated follow-up album to Dookie, Nimrod. Every kid between the ages of 10 and 20 is ready to pounce on the album when it hits stores. Every one of my friends begs their parents to take them to the store on that cold Tuesday morning. The older kids ditch class to get in line at the local Best Buy. The album sells 80,000 copies in the first week and over 2 million before the new Millennium . Now, let's fast forward to 2004. Green Day is preparing for the release their eighth album, American Idiot. This time, none of my friends rush to Best Buy, where the CD is only $12.99. None of the little soon-to-be punk rock middle school kids are begging their parents for a ride. Instead, nearly every kid I know between the ages of 10 and 20 is on the Internet downloading the album illegally. Whether it's Bit Torrent or Kazaa or Limewire, as long as the quality is decent, my friends couldn't care less where they get it. This is no new concept for these kids, who have grown up in what is known as the information age. All they know are laptops, I-Pods, cell phones, and CD/DVD burners. Lucky for Green Day, not every kid in America has a broadband connection and even some who do, ultimately bought the CD to support the legendary rockers. Still, Green Day has to wonder just how many kids have their record via the Internet. They also have to wonder how bad things will get as more and more people are getting high-speed Internet access and sharing files illegally. At this very moment, there are 2,239,976 users on the Kazaa network. If every user downloads just one album a night for a week, there will have been 188,157,984 ill... ... middle of paper ... ...stealing it. Life is full of temptations, and many of these temptations are easy to access (illegal downloading, drugs, alcohol, sex) and most have severe consequences. In the end, nothing in a news report on CNN, an article in Creative Loafing, or a lecture from the singer of your favorite band will guarantee that the user will stop downloading illegally, especially if the user is willing to take his or her chances with the RIAA. Everybody lives by their own rules and everybody who is informed knows exactly what they are getting themselves into if they continue to download illegally. What we can do as a society is to explain to Average Joe how and why what they are doing is illegal in hopes to turn a user over to the good side. This, in my opinion, is the only way to start to put an end to illegal downloading and begin a new era of cheap "pay per song" services.
To conclude this paper Greenday's contributions did not come from the band members playing something musically in a new revolutionary way. Their contributions came from being themselves and being at there at the right time. Their music contributions gave punk the popularity it needed to make a comeback in the 90's and to sort of come back to a type of rock and roll. This specific album had obvious teen angst and more lighthearted compared to “American Idiot.” Overall this album is very catchy, very pleasant to the ear, and a classic punk album to be enjoyed by most people.
Singers and songwriters need to make a living somehow. They know that downloading music is a way to get their voice heard, but they also know that it is significantly hurting the business. "When your product is being regularly stolen, there comes a time when you have to take appropriate action," said RIAA president Cary Sherman (RIAA 1). There are a lot of people involved in the music scheme when it comes to who needs to get paid by the revenue. From the sale of one CD, singers get one small fraction of the cost, another fraction goes to song writers, musicians also get some of the profit along with retailers, engineers, technicians, warehouse working, and ever...
I was first introduced to the band Green Day when I listened to their song “Good Riddance” on their album Warning when it was released in 1997. I continued to listen to Green Day’s music throughout my teenage years after they released their next two albums, American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown. When I was young I enjoyed Green Day’s music because it was fun to listen and sing along with, but as I grew older and actually started interpreting the lyrics of their songs I realized that there was a deeper message to their music. Many of my friends also commented on the motive behind Green Day’s music, and this led us to long-winded discussions about government and politics. We didn’t fully comprehend what we were talking about, but it was obvious that their music had provoked interesting emotions in us. Green Day’s often controversial punk-rock was so influential that it sent a media-influenced generation looking for answers to the meaning behind their politically-charged lyrics in their albums American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown even years later.
Throughout time, people have resorted to stealing in order to obtain items instead of buying them. It became a problem so consequences were made. Even dating back to the Ten Commandments there were laws against stealing. Recently, theft has become a problem over the internet. Musicians and music companies have lost millions in revenue. Websites such as Napster, The Pirate Bay, and Pandora have made it extremely easy for people, specifically teens, to illegally download and or listen to music for free. Pirating music has become a problem especially because “91 percent of all new music was downloaded illegally over the Internet instead of purchased,” says Logan Lynn from Huffington Post (Lynn). Many, such as the RIAA claim that music piracy is “an ongoing and evolving challenge,” (Who) while others suggest that it is “keeping the music industry alive,” (Issacson).
Big time record companies and artist are losing billions of dollars due to people illegally downloading music files. The
Richard Simmons, the lead singer of the rock band KISS, has been cited (should “as” be here? Not sure.) speaking out in a distasteful and informal manner against illegal file sharing with the following quote: “It’s only their (you should define who “they” are before this. Seems a little out of context. It seems like you are still addressing file sharing, which is what you introduce the quote as being about, but in reality, he is addressing the people who allow it, whoever they may be) fault for letting foxes get into the henhouse and then wondering why there’s no eggs or chickens. Every little college kid, every freshly-scrubbed little kid’s face should have been sued off the face of the earth. They should have taken their houses and cars and nipped it right there in the beginning”(Source). In his statement, Richard encapsulates the indignation many musicians feel towards people who steal music through file sharing (also known as music piracy). This anger is warranted by the morally accepted viewpoint that stealing is unethical. Music piracy is not measly pilfering, either. “As a consequence of global and U.S.-based piracy of sound recordings, the U.S. economy loses $12.5 billion in total output annually”(Source). However, what if the unhappiness that Richard and other artists feel from illegal file sharing also caused millions of people to be happy? Would the wrongs (that) stealing music caused be morally justified by the prodigious quantity of pleasure generated by music piracy? This is a question similar to one that the founder of a philosophy known as utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, asked himself. Through the question, Bentham concluded that “[t]he highest principle of morality is to maximize happiness, the overall balance of...
People have been finding alternative ways to access their music since technology evolved, whether it was recording songs off the radio onto a cassette tape or borrowing your friend’s CD in order to ‘burn’ it, No one played by the rules, legally. This piece will discuss illegally downloading music and the political theories and concepts it represents. What are the social norms and attitudes that drive this behaviour? and what is the solution, if there is one?
Physical piracy-the copying and illegal sale of hard-copy CDs, videotapes, and DVDs-costs the music industry over $4 billion a year worldwide and the movie industry more than $3.5 billion. These numbers do not factor in the growing (and difficult to measure) problem of Internet piracy, in which music and movies are transferred to digital format and copies are made of the resulting computer file. Journalist Charles C. Mann explains why Internet piracy has the potential to be vastly more damaging to copyright industr...
All of us know about the crimes committed every day by people all over the world. Theft, assault, grand theft auto, underage drinking, fraud, prostitution, and rape. But what about crimes on the internet? Last year, SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) was introduced to the world. If this bill was passed, many sites would have to censor certain pieces of information, as well as remove a lot of the content already uploaded. SOPA would also crack down on terminating torrent sites, which are used to share files such as music, movies, video games, e-books, and whatever else is a digital file. In my opinion, SOPA should not be passed due to the fact that censoring information on the internet is an act against the first amendment. SOPA should not be passed due to the fact that it goes against the first amendment and will lead to a corrupt information sharing system.
There are a lot of people who download music and movies without paying. The main reason that this is such a big issue is because piracy substitutes for a legitimate transaction; for example, someone who would have originally bought a DVD of the movie Young Guns but instead downloads it for free on The Pirate Bay. In this case, the person pirating the movie or song would never have bought it. This happens frequently if the “pirate” lives in a relatively poor country, like China, and is simply unable to afford to pay for the films and music he or she downloa...
Nowadays, it is extremely easy to download free music from the internet. All someone has to do is download some peer to peer file-sharing application such as Kazaa, Edonkey, Blubster, or Bearshare, and you have unlimited access to download just about anything that you please. But is downloading free music from one of these applications legal? I think that it is. This paper will look at both sides of the argument.
The first reason why downloading and uploading copyrighted materials from the Internet should be legal is that downloading copyrighted materials positively affects the economy. The European Commission Joint Research Center reported that the profits of music companies would be 2% lower if uploading and downloading copyrighted materials were banned. However, music companies are able to acquire more profits despite illegal downloading because many people tend to purchase CDs or DVDs after watching or listening to copyrighted materials for free. Moreover, the research showed that people who download music illegally spent more money to buy music than people who did not download illegally. In addition, research conducted by the Swiss government informed that one-third of Swiss people downloaded copyrighted materials from the Internet because personal use of copyrighted materials is legal in Switzerland. Even though there is a fact that many people can download copyrighted materials from the Internet legally in Switzerland, the amount of money that people spend to buy copyrighted materials is not f...
Moreover, hackers came up with new ways to remove the digital copyrights so the same as before one downloads music and distributes them around. The industry gets its revenue from selling this content, whether it’s online or in stores, this funds new projects and allows for better products in the future. The public should be aware of this, downloading the content for free, and not buying it will decrease revenue for the companies, stopping them from undertaking future projects. “Production companies should lower the price on their products, I can’t buy music for at least 20$ per album and DVDs for 30$, I only make 200$ per month,” said George Issa, a music fan who spends most of his nights downloading music from the internet, “when there is an album or movie that I really like, I try to buy it legally, I don’t think I am doing anything wrong, they are wrong making money off our backs,” he added.
Music piracy is a developing problem that it affects the music industry in many different ways including being responsible for the unemployment of 750,000 workers, as well as a loss of $2,5 billion; therefore, I want to explore ‘To what extent has music piracy affected the music industry market in the United States over the last 10 years?’
With the popularity of the Internet, sales for CDs, DVDs, Movies, and many other products have increased. Along with the increase of sales has brought forth an ever increasing problem of illegal media being downloaded. Programs such as Bittorent, Kazaa, and other direct-connect networking programs have allowed the transferring of such illegal media. Downloading song files from the Internet over a free peer to peer network is the moral equivalent of shoplifting music CDs from the local mall.