Music Pirates

If I were to take a poll in class where everybody answered honestly, I would have to assume that almost every student, if not all students have illegally downloaded music at least one time in their lives.  Does this mean we are stamped with the title “pirates”?  In his book Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig defines the term piracy as “using the creative property of others without their permission”.  So technically, yes we are pirates.  But this seems to be a pretty broad definition of piracy and I would even argue that we (the people casually downloading free music online) aren’t necessarily the pirates in this situation.

Behind all of these innocent, poor, students who are downloading free music illegally are specific websites that encourage online piracy.  These peer-to-peer or P2P networks share a wide variety of media including music, movies, television shows, and even pornography.  These networks allow a free way to get what people would usually have to pay for.  Sounds pretty appealing to a college student paying tens of thousands of dollars in tuition, doesn’t it?  Some may argue that it is wrong to steal music from artists who are working hard to put out this music, that it is only fair to the musicians if we buy their music.  

Actually, free downloads online benefit the artists if anything.  Janis Ian, a successful recording artists who thrived in the 60s and 70s puts this argument in perspective by saying, “When Napster was running full-tilt, we recieved about 100 hits a month from people who’d downloaded Society’s Child or At seventeen for free, then decided they wanted more information.  Of those 100 people (and these are the only ones who let us know how they’d found the site), 15 bought CDs.  Not huge sales, right? No record company is interested in 180 extra sales a year.  But... that translates to $2700, which is a lot of money in my book.  And that doesn’t include the ones who bought the CDs in stores, or who came to my shows.”  We see this strategy being used more and more in today’s music industry.  Non mainstream hip-hop artists like Curren$y release numerous mixtapes online for free.  In doing this, it expands his fan base by word of mouth and easily accessed music.  Last year, Curren$y made $1,000,000 on his tour alone.  Coincidence? I think not.

On another note, I read an article a couple years back on USA TODAY about college students getting sued for having illegally downloaded music on their computers.  The RIAA was suing students up to $18,000 dollars.  Its not the artists that are concerned about their music getting distributed for free online, but the billion dollar record companies.  These bloodthirsty companies suing students of almost a years tuition.  That seems more harmful than downloading a couple songs a week to me. So ask yourself, who is the real “pirate” here?