About Copyrights and Illegal Downloading. . . A sticky Issue

If you asked students on campus if they have ever illegally downloaded music, the answer will most likely be yes.  Even if they say no, most students have at one point copied a CD from a friend, or received a mixed CD – you are still receiving music that you have not personally paid for and this is illegal.

            When an artist copyrights their music, this is government assurance that they will be the ones to control the distribution of their work and they will be the beneficiaries of any monetary income resulting from their work.  A copyright allows us to take ownership of our own ideas/work.  Without copyrights, there will be less incentive for artists to share their work or ideas because there is no guarantee that it won’t be stolen.  A copyright is the closet thing we have to a guarantee. And even so, artist’s work is stolen every day as music is illegally shared and downloaded.  A single illegal download may not seem like much – the offender probably thinks that they haven’t taken much (if anything) away from the artist.  But just imagine if every student on campus illegally shared/downloaded a single song – that’s over $3000 lost to artists.  Now just think of all the users out there who have illegally downloaded thousands of songs each.  All of this adds up and can be a significant loss to an artist. Instead of illegally downloading songs of our favorite artists, we should support them by buying their music and hopefully this will help them to stick around and make more music – not all artists out there are millionaires.  

About Copyrights and Illegal Downloading. . . A sticky Issue by Betsy Adams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.