As I mentioned earlier in the week I am the president of the radio station
on campus. I have taken a lot of music from CD’s that I have found and
downloaded it to my iTunes. I know of at least 30 other people that have done this even though it is technically illegal. I know that the number of people taking the work impacts whether or not it is a problem. I have thought about how much money has been taken from the artist by all of us downloading the entire album from sharing the CD. Assuming 50 people have downloaded the CD over the years and saying the album costs $7.99 on iTunes that is $399.50 that the artist and associates did not see. At that point the music isn’t just being used for personal use but there is nobody to enforce it. I do feel kind of bad for what I have done but it isn’t going to stop me because there is basically no way of getting accused of stealing music.
I feel bad about it too. I don’t really listen to music on my iPod because I use it for other reasons, but when I do, I usually get it from CD’s. I don’t see why I don’t have to pay to copy each song from a CD onto the computer because then it can be copied indefinitely. I can get 1000 iPods and and put music on them from CD’s and that would theoretically be acceptable if they were all my iPods. I don’t like charging iPods, that’s why I have 1000.
That’s a lot of money to be spent on Ipods. Technically, couldn’t you just buy 2, and have one charging while the other is being used, and just switch them?
People copy cd’s and share music libraries every day. Personally, I think that the gap that exists between the law and the access people have today is utterly absurd. The law states that it is illegal to copy such materials. Yet, it is effortless for one to partake in such a matter; it is literally a few mouse-clicks away. This is indeed a very complex issue.
This kind of issue digs into personal use, which, is essentially impossible to regulate. On a simpler level, if I buy a video, watch it, and then let a friend borrow it, and he watches it, there was no copy made. But at the same time, two people have accessed material that was only paid for the quantity of one. The concept is similar, but the ease of copying music simply allows that concept to multiply to larger extremes