Digital Rights Managment

My personal thoughts and opinions towards music piracy are somewhat ambiguous. Do I own any form of stolen music? Absolutely! Do I illegally download countless songs and albums? No! Most of the music I obtain is either through a CD I purchased, or a CD that a friend purchased that has been burned onto my computer, or through purchasing songs off of iTunes. My friends and I also obtain a lot of songs through sending each other iTunes files via email. Obviously this is still illegal, but at the end of the day either I or the person I know is paying for it. However, I will say that although I do think that entertainers make an exhorbant amount of money should not be complaining about a lack of profit, I do think that at the end of the day they provided a service and they should be compensated for it. The music industry is a multi-billion dollar industry and someone has to be getting paid.

The problem is, many of these downloads are only compatible with software owned by the distributor. For example, iTunes has songs with DMR protection and these songs are only compatible with Apple products. Once I buy the song I should be able to put it on whatever device I want. In addition, has anyone ever noticed how SOME songs on iTunes are now $1.29 as opposed to the $.99 they were before? That is because the songs that are $1.29 have the DRM protection in it. My problem with this is, many individuals say that if the rights of the creators are not protected there will not be any money to produce new material. However, only some songs have this DMR protection, so is what they are telling me is that only some artists are worth of having their creativity protected?

As stated earlier I do not think it is right to continuously download music and albums without paying any money for it, however, I don’t see the harm in file sharing as long as one of the individuals actually purchased the music. The problem occurs when the music industry tries to break music piracy down to something that is morally wrong, when in actuality, there are companies that are capitalizing on DMR and only protecting the artistic creations of certain artists, and through doing this they are forcing us to buy only their products.

-Andrea