Music Piracy Essay

Introduction

According to Wikipedia, digital music is the “technology that can be used to record, store, generate, manipulate and reproduce sound using audio signals.” These are embedded in a digital form.

Digital music has been developed since the 1970’s and has replaced analog studio technology greatly. Digital music has led to growth of music downloads because it is simpler for a music listener to download music straight away from sites like iTunes and Google Play, instead of going out to a shop to buy a hard copy like a cd. In some cases it is cheaper to buy digital downloads than by a cd or record but this can lead to a lot of copyright and piracy issues also.

A music download is simply the transferral of free or purchased music from a website to a user’s computer. Music

The Recording Industry Association of America, also known as the RIAA has stated that music piracy is “a real, ongoing and evolving challenge.” It is very simple for a person to buy a download of an artist’s music and simply upload it to peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing sites, like The Pirate Bay, and let other users illegally download the song or album for free. This has become a huge problem globally. In America, music piracy causes 12.5 billion dollars in losses in terms of the US economy which leads to a 2 billion dollar loss in wage for American workers and more importantly, job losses of up to 70,000 people. Even burning a copy of a cd and giving it to another person comes under an act of music piracy. According to the book “Pop Song Piracy: Disobedient Music Distribution since 1929” by Barry Kernfeld, it says that even photocopying printed music is still an act of copyright infringement. It also states that in 1897, musical compositions needed permission from the copyright owner to perform the chosen song in public. This shows that piracy affects all music