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Capstone General Interdisciplinary The Internet discourse, overblown and juvenile as it may be, demonstrates that illegal file-sharing is not just a U. S. problem. Even if the Recording Industry Association of America makes good on its threat to sue thousands of people who are distributing pirated material in the U. S. , it will hardly be able to choke the supply of free tunes (Ewing). The theory is that 90 % of the illegal content comes from a core of dedicated users of file-sharing software such as Kazaa.
If the RIAA can scare those hard-core sharers with lawsuits, it might disrupt the whole network. The Web, though, really is worldwide. Even if the record companies shut down Americans who provide free songs, downloaders can get the same material from overseas sources. Users of Kazaa, Grokster, or BearShare have no way of telling whether the songs they are taking come from Frankfurt, Germany, or Frankfort, Kentucky. (Ewing) Youth culture is as global as the Internet. That is especially true in Europe, where young people listen to many of the same bands as their American counterparts, and a healthy 10 % of homes have the high-speed Net links essential for sharing.
While file-swapping is not as epidemic in Europe as in the U. S. , it is growing fast. About 6. 4 million Germans over age 10 downloaded music last year, up 31 % from the previous year. (Ewing) Abroad, the industry also worries about strong-arming customers, because potential buyers have fewer legal ways of getting music online than in the U. S. So until the industry can deal with these tough issues internationally, it can block the front door for U.
S. sharers, but plenty of tunes will come in through the worldwide window of the Internet (Ewing). Most music downloaders are not using their downloads to build massive collections of music. The study found that only 10 percent of downloaders have more than 100 songs stored on their hard drives and that 63 percent have fewer than 25 songs stored.
Some people, after thinking about it, change their minds about the first scenario while very few change their minds about the second. Changing ones mind is a perfectly fine thing to do and one of the goals of studying ethics, but it does not explain the original difference in intuitions about what constitutes stealing in case of traditional stealing and virtual stealing. Some people really disagree that there is a significant differences about whether a particular act is stealing, despite the fact we both think that stealing, as a concept, is ethically wrong. What can be done to prevent people from stealing? First of all, it is not clear if the act of recording music from the Internet can be called stealing. No one ever tried to make it illegal to record music off of the radio onto cassettes.
Sometimes a person could even get lucky enough to record the entire album if the station played it. One can still do it that way if he / she want to. Are some artists going to try and have receivers with cassette recorders outlawed also? Probably not, and the analogy is clear here. Artists and their producing studios should probably come up with the idea of how to persuade people to buy CDs, offer them some kind of incentive not to download it from the Internet, instead of trying to apply laws and punish the guilty ones. Bibliography: Global Downloading, Local Lawsuits; Ewing, Jack and Green, Heather; Business Week Online; October 6, 2003; Music Downloads Not Theft, Americans Say; Enos, Lori; E-Commerce Times, October 2, 2000 Why suing college students for illegal music downloading is right; Marci A.
Hamilton, CNN. com, August 7, 2003
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Research essay sample on Change Their Minds Songs Stored Music
