A Generation on Musical Piracy
A mere twenty years ago owning and collecting music would be an expensive hobby, the sheer amount of money that went into buying CDs, cassette tapes and vinyl records would astound most people today. Yet only a single generation later, most people carry a library of songs in their pocket that only twenty years ago would have had the same monetary value as a car. And most of the songs would have been downloaded for free, and illegally.
Despite the potential five year prison sentence and $60,500 fine for individual offenders, this has done little to deter the majority of population from using filesharing websites or peer-to-peer in order to illegally download music for free. A major breach of intellectual property laws and apparently costing $1.8 billion in taxes to the federal government, according to the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft. An internet poll by Compare Broadband found that one in three Australians admitted to illegally downloading entertainment, and twenty-nine percent admitted that they downloaded on a regular basis. For the Australian youth who have grown up alongside the evolution of the internet, illegally downloading music comes as easy as breathing. Despite multiple adverts and campaigns to protect intellectual property, many don’t equate downloading music to be the same as stealing. While many do acknowledge that what they are doing is illegal in nature, many do not see the harm it does to the entertainment industry and to their government. The digitization of music has provided many benefits for music artists and producers everywhere, however the game has changed in how users can now easily pick and choose what they want to listen to, when they want to listen to it. Further information on the impact of illegally downloading music can be found here. |
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