Essay 4: Week 5 — Global Content and file sharing

Downloading movies and music has become second nature to internet users, including myself, in this current digital climate. ‘Torrenting’ or online peer-to-peer file sharing is something that I cautiously admit to doing every day. It used to be that copy-prevention companies’ adopted the ethos ‘We’ll make it easier to buy a copy of this data than to make an unauthorised copy of it. That way, only the uber-nerds and the cash-poor/time-rich classes will bother to copy instead of buy (Doctor 2007).’ While this school of thought may have been practical once, in 2015 you can simply download the original product from the internet.

The legal side of ‘sharing’ copyright information online has always seemed to be one step behind the technology. This is one flaw in the present global copyright laws; they are always failing in the game of catch up. One of the biggest cons of these laws is that the majority of the time they are catching the downloaders- not the individuals or organisations that are mass producing the files. This has led to many court cases where torrent or peer-to-peer sharing individuals as young as teenagers have been facing damages claims for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

An extreme case In 2009 saw Boston University Ph.D student being to pay damages amounting to $675,000. This was to be shared between four major record labels, for illegally downloading 30 songs online as the result of a then-two year trial between Tenenbaum and the record labels (McMillan 2013).

Cory Doctorow described it perfectly, ‘Every techno-literate participant in the information economy can choose to access any data’. This describes how readily available this content is and how easy it is to download for users who may be completely oblivious to the court case they may be bringing upon themselves.

While I may be against the hefty fines issued to unassuming ‘torrentors’ I do believe there is a place for copyright laws. Musicians, artists, filmmakers, actors and everyone in between deserve to be paid for their work. There just needs to be a more adept, scape-goat-free system of dealing with piracy.

Reference List:

Doctorow, C 2007, Free data sharing is here to stay, The Guardian, retrieved 7 September 2015 <http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/sep/18/informationeconomy>.

McMillan, G 2013, Appeals court approves $675, 000 fine for student who illegally download 30 songs, Digital Trends, retrieved September 7 September 2015 <http://www.digitaltrends.com/music/appeals-court-denies-piracy-penalty-plea/ >.