Illegal Downloading of Music - A Transition Year Student's Opinion

The music industry has been hit hard by the problem posed by illegal downloading. Downloading music without paying for it is so easy today, you can do it for just about any song within minutes. The number of websites you can do this on are endless. It’s so simple that it’s possible with just about every song you can think of. What this does is rob the music industry as a whole of much if its profits. This can eventually lead to artist’s not making record labels enough money, causing them to loose popularity and be out of a job. Illegal downloading is essentially killing off the music industry just for the sake of saving a miniscule, sometimes insignificant amount of money on one song.
Many people I know use a program called Limewire to download music for free, others use a website called Beemp3. With these you can simply type in the name of the song you want, and it’s right there for downloading at the click of a button. Not all people exploit this though, a lot of people do download music safely and legally. In fact, the record for the most downloaded digital single in the world is “Flavour of Life” by Japanese artist, Hikaru Utada, with 7.7 million legal downloads worldwide in just one week. Japan also has the highest count of iTunes users in the world.
Illegal downloading applies to movies as well, people would rip the movies from their DVDs and put them up on the internet, others would bring recording equipment into cinemas, both of which of course are against the copyright agreement and are therefore, illegal. These cinema recordings would most commonly be sold on the streets, making the seller liable for a court fine and/or prison sentence.
File sharing is a very commonplace entity in copyright crimes. File sharing is where people make files that they choose, available for mass download by the public. This is how most people download movies illegally. Some examples of file sharing websites are: Rapidshare, MegaUpload, Fileshunt, etc.
Recently in Ireland, a system was proposed to internet providers to do a “three strikes and you’re out” regime. If their customers are caught illegally downloading files more than three times, then their broadband provision will be terminated, Some companies didn’t sign up for this, knowing that it would more than likely decimate their customer base. They have said that they are hoping to come up with a less dramatic solution to the problem posed by file sharing and how they can help to stop it. Their excuse is that they cannot be held responsible for how their customers use their broadband.
The Irish Recorded Music Association has showed great concern over this matter and has spoken with several of Ireland’s broadband providers. Being the company to handle all of the royalties when it comes to the Irish music industry, they have been losing a lot of profits because of illegal downloading. The issue as a whole is becoming quite an embarrassment to them so they are taking swift action to prevent it from growing any further. They have taken the brunt of the blow and need to stop it from getting worse.

Conor Madden – Transition Year Student John Scottus Senior School, Dublin 4