Quinn Kravitz: Music Piracy

Music Piracy Opinion
File sharing in general and music “piracy” in particular is a tender subject and in my humble opinion, not as much of a big deal as the outraged cries of the outraged record companies would have you think. When the word “piracy” is thrown about you may get mental pictures of angry old men, skin toughened by water and salt, with blood in their gums and swords at their sides. However, the kind of pirates involved in (music) file sharing usually fall into the category of regular people who don’t like paying exorbitant fees for music, not swindling merchants of sin. These regular people, including artists themselves, are subject to pure fury from record companies, and in cases that are admittedly few in far between, charged hundreds of thousands of dollars for downloading a handful of songs. The treatment of these “pirates” is both bizarre and frustrating. If anything it makes us want to raid the ports of these record companies with renewed passion, plundering song upon song, lighting fire to whole cellars of albums, and taking musicians life works for ransom. In reality, music is meant to be shared by whoever wants it and shouldn’t be masked by greed. Paying over a dollar per song is just silly, and any smart human being wouldn’t subject themselves to such tomfoolery. Luckily the pirates have the upper hand as there are thousands of different ways to get music for free, but the illegality of the whole fiasco is absurd.

Charging money for Mp3 files is simply wrong. Most of the musicians aren’t affected in the slightest. They make money from touring, merchandise sales, record sales etc. Record companies just want to make more and more money off of their prize hens, and when people get fed up with it, label said offenders as criminals. Free music is a great help when it comes to spreading peoples tastes and actually encouraging them to support the artist. “…a little piracy can be a good thing. Sure, O.K., I ripped the audio of the Shins' Phantom Limb off a YouTube video. But on the strength of that minor copyright atrocity, I legally bought two complete Shins albums and shelled out for a Shins concert. The legit market feeds off the black market. Music execs just need to figure out how to live with that.” (Lev Grossman, Time Magazine). Lev Grossman gives a fantastic example of what goes on all the time. If some piracy was simply allowed, then users would surely discover new music they like, and likely help the execs profit by spending money on things related to the band that PIRACY DISCOVERED FOR THEM. Another example of the monopolies on the 60 billion dollar music industry is the fact that iTunes, a popular mp3 downloading program, only lets the user convert its files onto Apple products. Small things like this all build up and push many people to simply getting the same quality of music for free. After all if a restaurant served an exclusive recipe for chicken pot pie but only made it available if you agreed to eat nowhere else and to pay 50 dollars per pie, why would you not go to the vendor outside, giving out pies for free…recipe and all. I want my pie.
In an interview with cbsnews.com, Seam Parker (creator of failed mp3 distributor Napster) estimated that “4 to 10 trillion songs have been downloaded illegally as opposed to 4 billion or so legally.” This war on piracy is an absolute failure and waste of time. The greed of these companies should simply shame them into giving up. This is as if they sold cocaine legally but found a way to illegalize the exact same thing sold by anyone else. People need to step up and fight against these companies who are so motivated by money that they sue random Americans for ridiculous amounts of compensation. Their rampant run of monopolizing and overreacting is useless and has already been put down by an army. An army of people like you. An army of pirates. It’s time that music is made legal to download for free, the longer this is stalled, the angrier we get, and the worse these companies look. When record labels charge fees such as 750 dollars per song illegally downloaded by the “culprits” (Harper vs. Maverick Recording Company) they look the biggest a-holes in the world. Give it up. We won.