How Piracy started
Napster
- First major file sharing program
- Established in 1999
- It pioneered the free 'sharing' of music tracks around the world
- Napster once had over 25 million users and 80 million songs
- Some high profile music artists started filing law suits for copyrighted music
- In July 2001 Napster was shut down
- Received a law suit by The Recording Industry Association of America
- September 2001, payed music creators and copyright owners $26 million
- Then declares bankruptcy
YouTube converters
- One of the most prominent ways people now pirate music
- You paste the URL of a YouTube video into the website, choose the format, (MP3 or MP4) then downloaded onto your computer
- Many sites for doing this
- A lot get taken down by they're quickly replaced with others
- Negative impact on the industry.
- People aren't paying for the music, and takes money from the artist
- Piracy has cost the music industry $12.5 billion in economic losses
- Results in less money in the music industry
- Could result in less music being made, (as they don't have the money to make what they want)
- To combat the decrease in profits the music industry has started firing employees
- But others think that the pirating of music is helping
- Could be beneficial as people who have downloaded songs, may want the artist's merchandise
- Illegal music consumption could stimulate legal music consumption (in theory)
- File sharing can allow consumers to sample songs/albums which can inform them on what to buy
- The sampling of a song may stimulate individual demand for other songs by the same artist
- Not too much can really be done to stop piracy
- A lot of lawsuits don't follow through
- New sites are created everyday for people to pirate stuff off (music, software, etc)
- 2007, Prince launched a legal action against the Pirate Bay. The case was never followed through
- 2014 Prince decided to take legal action against 22 of his fans who posted copies of his live performances online.
- Ed O'Brien (Radiohead) has said he doesn't think pirating is ruining the music industry. "They might not buy an album, but they're spending their money buying concert tickets, a T-shirt, whatever."
- 2007 Radiohead released their 7th album online for free
