In order to
reduce/eliminate this type of illegal activity, there are three things that the
government or the music industry in general could do.
The first thing
that the music industry could do is show just how the industry is being affected
by these illegal downloads. There have been plenty of people to say that the
music industry is harmed thanks to the illegal downloads of songs and albums,
but there have been no official releases to prove this. At the least, there
should be some famous spokesperson who would have actively spoken out about how
their business is decreasing due to these illegal downloads.
The second thing that
the government could do in order to prevent these illegal downloads from
happening would be to make sure that the websites that make it possible for
these downloads happen are taken down and banned from existence. The creation
and maintenance of these websites just add to the positive correlation of these
downloads. If these websites were taken down and charged, society would realize
that there is a moral negativity to the action of taking music from those who
have created it without properly paying them for their creation.
The third thing
that the music industry could do is create a randomized serial number-like
system on each music file. For example, when a song is purchased from Amazon
Music or iTunes the song will have a prerecorded serial number which will be
coded to the account and device that the song was bought on. The method would probably
really hard to actually do, but if the music industry were able to create something
along these lines they would be less at risk of having others share, copy or
steal the music.
I definitely agree with the first idea on the list. Campaigning against illegal downloading activity and documenting the effects of illegal file sharing/torrenting on the music and film industries could possibly affect how people view the illegal activity. The problem with that is it would be hard to convince a lot of people about the detrimental effects because of how musicians and film stars are portrayed in our society. Your second idea, while sound in reasoning, would prove to be quite difficult. Take The Pirate Bay for example. TPB is one of the biggest sources for torrenting files, yet it is still running perfectly. The reasoning behind this is that while the site is made for illegal file sharing, its job is to point people towards people that are doing the file sharing, not actually partaking in the activity themselves. While this would still lead to a lot of sites being shut down, TPB is based in Sweden, where laws about torrenting are a lot more relaxed. So if one file sharing site is shut down, more will pop up, possibly in locations where they would be hard to shut down. For your third idea, I see a bit of a flaw with it. How would people that still buy CDs or want to make custom CDs be affected? Having codes for the songs bought on their respective computers the songs were downloaded on seems like it would inhibit people from being able to transfer songs from devices using physical copies. Of course, if physical copies of music and films were to disappear than this method would have a good possibility of working, but at least for a while there will be a lot of people that prefer to buy the physical copies of the music and films they want.
ReplyDeleteI like your third idea. Having a unique serial code could prevent illegal sharing much like physical tags prevent theft in retail stores. However, what impact would if have on legal sharing? Say you give a friend a CD to listen to...would the computer automatically block/prevent the song from playing?
ReplyDeleteThere may have to be some sort of system where the original purchaser could allow sharing with certain people. However, this may make that idea even more expensive and impractical. Just my two cents.
I like your spin on the idea of preventing downloads from happening by putting the blame on the free-download websites, rather than the people who download it. If it's illegal to download, why is it allowed to be online? That's like saying you can't buy alcohol underage but you can drink it (not a real law!).
ReplyDeleteCould you explain the serial number idea further? If i understand correctly, I think you are saying that files can be tracked and should only be found on the account where it was purchased, not anywhere else? That is an interesting concept. It reminds me of serial numbers on guns. I wonder how well that would work. Surely if they have the technology to create these random serial numbers, they would have the technology to keep track of them.
One last comment: I like how you worded your first solution: "there have been no official releases to prove this." I had never thought about it in regards to an "official release." If you check out my blog post, I wrote about advertising campaigns in a documentary style that could follow artists who have been negatively affected by illegal downloads. But this might appear too one-sided, too biased (seeing as how it is an advertisement). But your idea might be more effective because people might believe it more or find an official press release to be more trustworthy.
I think that the first idea is very interesting. I like the idea about how the music industry could start a dialogue about the issue, but what would happen after that? Would they petition for something specific to happen? As far as the second idea, I'm not sure it would be possible to delete every single website from existence. I am sure new ones would be popping up as soon as the old ones were taken down. That might be hard to do, realistically. I think you are really onto something with your third idea. Putting a serial code on each song would be a brilliant way to track songs on the internet. If someone could figure out how to do that, I think that would be a great solution to this issue of illegally downloading material!
ReplyDelete