Life in the Network

As we speak right now, millions of people are illegally downloading music, pictures, videos and so much more. However, so many of these people do not think that this act is actually illegal. I would relate it to speeding; people know subconsciously that they are breaking the rules; however people do it all the time because they do not get caught and charged for their actions. Piracy has been the hot topic for the past decade or so with the rise and the amount of efficiency that technology brings to each home. Steve Jobs did a very good job about sitting on the fence about the topic of illegally downloading information.
While watching the movie, I thought that it was very interesting the concept. I kept waiting for an actual movie to appear until I realized that the FBI slides WERE the movie. I found it interesting, along with everyone else probably that there were so many variations of the same thing. I don’t know if that is illegal or not, however they all stated the same information so I didn’t feel as though it was copywriting because I feel as though it is a Monopoly of a company to run each of the warnings during each movie. However, now watching that movie, I have no idea. It also brought to my attention now when I watch movies to notice and not a single warning has been the same yet. It is kind of ironic that the movie industry is having problems with the warning of a copyright law being copyrighted.
Also, according to one of the other articles, it stated that the artist itself will only receive $.80 per record that they sell so my whole rationale behind buying CD’s to support the artist doesn’t really work out the way that I thought it did. Because the artists don’t get as much money as I thought they did, I don’t see why the artists are so upset about illegally downloading music. I know that most of the anger comes from the record labels itself, there is still enough people buying CDs in the stores because like me, they do not know that the artist does not get as much money as they are supposed to.
I also found it interesting the statistic that only 3% of the songs played on an iPod are correctly downloaded through iTunes or other paid subscriptions. I know many people that do illegally download through various other peer to peer such as Napster, Lime Wire as well as Ares. However, I feel as though many people still do it though because there are so many peer to peer websites that they just won’t get caught anymore.
Overall, I like to see that people are trying to catch the problem while they can, however I feel as though its like a virus. Once one p2p sharing network is caught, another one will grow and the cycle continues.