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ethical issues faced by napster
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Sharing Pirated MP3’s
The sharing of MP3 music and its legality is a major issue in our legal system at this time. It has been a battle in the courts for several years now. It all began with the legendary downfall of the original bad boy of sharing, Napster. Despite the legal actions of the music industry, the file sharing community continues to thrive. Millions of users still log on to a handful of programs and illegally trade MP3’s and other computer programs. College students are suspected to be one of the major culprits of People to People file sharing. A survey was conducted in order to obtain an understanding of why students of James Madison University would use People to People sharing programs. More importantly, it was to gain insight into the ethical outlook of students in concern to the sharing of MP3 music files. The survey attempts to determine why, in light of the ethical issue and possible legal repercussions, do JMU students still trade illegally pirated music?
The survey was composed of ten multiple choice questions and administered to twenty random students. The students were taken from various areas around the campus in order to obtain a wide variety of responses. It sought to have respondents who were of various age, race, and sex. The surveys were handed out in a classroom, a dining hall, and an events committee meeting for the University Programming Board. Students remained anonymous to the administer and their confidentiality was assured.
Most of the students filled out the survey with relative ease and only had to debate on a couple of the questions. Several students were kind enough to give a few extra minutes of their time for various follow up questions. I began to ask students which questions gave them the most trouble. Many felt the last question, asking if downloading MP3’s for free is ethical, was the most thought provoking question. Nineteen of the twenty students surveyed downloaded MP3’s. Fourteen said they felt it was unethical to download the MP3’s, yet most of them continue to download. The question seemed to stimulate an ethical debate inside the respondents of which they had trouble answering. A vast majority of the students simply do not care about pushing ethics aside and continue to download pirated music.
... “ the majority of [Native Americans] turned to the invaders’ cultures and religious for empowerment, knowledge and skills with which to sustain native identities and values in other guises” , many of them stilled called themselves “true people” by keeping their native names (116-117).
It is evident that the Native Americans were unfairly removed from their homeland because the Europeans settlers saw them as savages not worthy to live among them. The Native Americans responded to their cruelty with pleads of desperation. These pleads of desperation were annoyed and instead excuses of doing what’s “best” for them both proceeded.
Since 1999, the situation around music has been changed drastically. In that year, the novel software “Napster” was released. With this software, people became able to get any file they want easily, sometimes illegally. Some musicians and people in the entertainment industry have tried to exterminate that P2P “Peer to Peer” technology. But it looks as if their efforts are in vain. People are going to use P2P technology more and it might as well become the official way to handle music distribution. The music industry should rather take advantage of the technology than keep trying to exterminate it.
The article, “Native Reactions to the invasion of America”, is written by a well-known historian, James Axtell to inform the readers about the tragedy that took place in the Native American history. All through the article, Axtell summarizes the life of the Native Americans after Columbus acquainted America to the world. Axtell launches his essay by pointing out how Christopher Columbus’s image changed in the eyes of the public over the past century. In 1892, Columbus’s work and admirations overshadowed the tears and sorrows of the Native Americans. However, in 1992, Columbus’s undeserved limelight shifted to the Native Americans when the society rediscovered the history’s unheard voices and became much more evident about the horrific tragedy of the Natives Indians.
Haby Michelle, Donnelly Maria, Corry Justine, Vos Theo “Cognitive behavioral therapy for depression, panic disorder and generalized anxiety disorder: a meta-regression of factors that may predict outcome.” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry. 2006. Print. Pages 9-19.
Recently, there has been a series of copyright infringement litigations against Internet businesses that are involved with unauthorized distribution of music files. The US recording industry claims to lose three million dollars per year because of piracy. A report predicted an estimated 16 percent of all US music sales, or 985 million dollars would be lost due to online piracy by 2002 (Foege, 2000; cited from McCourt & Burkart, 2003) Even though this claim has to be taken with caution, as it is based on false assumption that if copyright laws were strictly enforced, audio pirates would become buyers, it is apparent that audio piracy grew to a worrisome level for the record industry. (Gayer & Shy, 2003)
MacNeil, G. (2001). Time-limited psychosocial treatment for specific panic disorders and agoraphobia. Brief Treatment and Crisis Intervention, 1(1), 29-41. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/brief-treatment/1.1.29
Dissociative identity disorder, a condition that has plagued and altered the minds of those who were diagnosed for many years, represents the condition in which an individual displays multiple personalities that overpower his or her behavior around others and even alone. Such personalities or identities can have staggering differences between them even being characterized by a disparate gender, race, or age. One of the sides of them can even be animal-like and display feral qualities. Also, the disorder severs the connection between the victim’s sense of identity, emotions, actions, and even memories from their own consciousness. The cause for this is known to be a very traumatic experience that the person had gone through previously and fails to cope with it, thus they dissociate themselves from the memory in order to keep their mental state in one piece. All these results from the disorder do not begin to tell of the rest of the horrors that gnaw away at the affected human.
Kluft RP. (1999). An overview of the psychotherapy of dissociative identity disorder. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 53(3),
Understanding the development of multiple personalities is difficult, even for highly trained experts; making a diagnosis of DID take time. It’s estimated that individuals with dissociative identity disorder has spent seven years in the mental health system prior to diagnosis. This is because of the similarities of symptoms of many psychiatric diagnosis of treatment that they seek. The DSM-IV provides the following criteria to diagnose dis...
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?
Music piracy is the process of copying, or file sharing copyrighted materials illegally. Music theft hurts the artists that bring music to your ears due to the fact that they’re not receiving a decent amount of income because their songs are obviously getting stolen. A survey has identified that 70 percent of all 18 to 29 year olds have pirated music, TV shows, or movies. “Music has been compact and easy to reproduce since the days of sheet music. It is, moreover, intensely social: People want to share it with each other, whether by sending a YouTube URL in the 21st century, trading Grateful Dead tapes in the 20th, or copying sheet music for other singers in the church choir in the 19th” (Berlatsky). Another poll found that 46 percent of all Americans have engaged in piracy (Anderson). Back in the 1980s, music piracy was slightly spotted, when people created things called mixed tapes, however making these did not cost the industry much money. Cases of music piracy highly increased after the compact disc (CD) was created in 1982. One major case of music piracy was affiliated with the heavy metal band Metallica on April 13, 2000. Metallica filed a lawsuit against Napster due to many copyright infringements, and racketeering. The heavy metal band found $10 million worth of damages which is roughly $100,000 per downloaded song. NetPD evaluated Napster’s illegal program, and produced a list of 335,435 users that were downloading and sharing the band’s albums.
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).
The United States of America is a free country, then why shouldn’t the internet be free? Why should we have restrictions placed on what we can and cannot do on the internet? Every day, millions of users share files on the internet through numerous online sources. Whether they download music, movies, or software, online file-sharing can give people access to a plentiful amount of information. These files are often free and easily accessible by anyone. The practice of distributing or providing access to digitally stored information represents file sharing (Peer-to-Peer File-Sharing and Copyright Infringement: Are You Vulnerable?). Conversely many people see file sharing as unlawful. The reproduction or distribution of any copyrighted digital media or information defines internet piracy. Many people see downloading copyright files such as music, movies, books, and software as illegal. Music files, some of the first types of files to be reproduced and distributed through internet sources, contain the file extension .mp3. Several popular file sharing programs were developed in the 1990s and facilitated internet piracy. Big industries try to combat file sharing to help increase their revenue, however internet piracy actually increases revenue of industries and has numerous other benefits (What Is Internet Piracy?). The copy and distribution of digital files increased due to technology (Torr). Internet piracy, considered a problem all over the world, stands as difficult to stop along with other kinds of piracy (What Is Internet Piracy?). Anything can be digitalized and once something becomes digitalized it will be shared all over the internet (Torr). Canadian and European laws allow for the downloading of copyright files for personal us...
At the turn of the millenium, the music industry has been faced with an unforeseen phenomenon that has affected its very foundation - mass scale music piracy. The decline of CD sales in the past three years have been blamed on the availability of songs that can be downloaded from Internet sites and service providers like Napster, KaZaA and Morpheus free of charge. Today the issue of intellectual copyright infringement in music has been taken more seriously than ever before, as large record labels and companies like Sony and EMI struggle to maintain healthy album sales in the face of online music piracy. In addition, music piracy affects more than just the corporate world - it affects the very artists who create music and receive no compensation for their efforts. In fact ?many high-profile and buzz artists, including Eminem, Oasis and most recently 50 Cent, have seen their upcoming albums undercut by file-sharing online before their scheduled releases, prompting record labels to move up street dates to avoid losing album sales.? (Grossberg) In light of this, are a few positive aspects in the face of such widespread negativity but music file sharing continues to be a controversial topic in the world of music and the arts in general.