Justifying piracy

IN the past few years, music piracy has become a large problem that has faced the music industry. The Recording Industry has sued thousands of people for sharing and downloading illegal copies of music from peer 2 peer sites like Morpheous or Kazaa. This has been the accepted notion in the United States with the courts ruling in favor of the Industry. The Industry has faced problems from the courts in other countries, including Canada, where the higher courts of law have upheld the claim that the people sharing the music had done nothing wrong. Why is it that courts are not finding in favor of the Recording Industry (hence forth to be known as RI)?

It is my contestation that the RI is actually acting in illegal ways and therefore are as much to blame as people who "illegally" share.

Around the year 2002, the RI was forced to offer a rebate to anyone who bought CD's from the year 1998 to 2002 (approx. those dates) and had receipts from those purchases because it was found out in the supreme court of America that the recording industries had colluded and had decided that they were going to artifically keep prices high. Due to technological advances, they were able to produce CD's at a cheaper price than they were able to up until that time. Of course, these geniuses that ran the record lables knew that if no one lowered the price, then they all could still sell CD's at the same price and make a larger profit off of their sales.

Now what they were doing was a big no-no for the free market economy that the US so proudly boasts about. For a quick crash course in economics, a free market economy there is a perfect exchage of information which means that a customer knows how much money goes into making the product (cost of labor, materials, promoting, fixed company costs, etc) this allows the customer's demand to dictate the price. The only way for a company to do better is to strive for an advance in technology or a new innovative way of producing the product to lower the cost of labor or materials inorder to lower their price and therefore grabbing a larger piece of the market that is out there. When companies start dictating the price of goods we have moved out of a free market economy and that stifles competition and innovation. So when the Recording Lables colluded, they started dictating the price of CD's and they stiffled innovation. That is, I believe, when the popularity of peer2peer sharing started, origonating with the first mainstream file sharing network NAPSTER.

With the advancement of technology, downloading songs onto a computer has become childsplay and commonplace in almost every household. A few companies have realized this and have gone to Lables in the RI and have set up networks on which you can buy songs for $.99. This is a step in the right direction for the RI, but my question is this: If the song costs $.99 to buy, and there are normally 12 songs on a CD, that roughly brings you to $12 for a CD album. This is roughly the price of a song on a CD. This sounds about right, until you start to think about what goes into making the CD that you buy in stores. First there is the music, aka the intellectual property, then there is the cost of the actual CD-ROM, then the progaming of it (most CD's that you buy today are highly interactive) then there is the cost of the jewel case then the designing and printing of the cover and they lyrics sleeve and the backsheet for the CD. If those costs are inherent in the CD that you buy from the store, shouldn't the song you purchase off of Itunes or REAL be cheaper? Or better yet, since the RI is complaining of all the money lost on CD sales due to downloading songs off of the internet, shouldn't they start creating their own services from which you could download songs off of and they could sell it at a cheaper price due to the fact that you are cutting out the middle man. Isn't that advancing with technology?

So while some pundits argue that downloading music off of peer2peer networks is illegal and immoral, I say to them I'm trying to operate in a free market economy on which the democracy of both the US and Canada have set the foundations of their government on.

If you thought this was interesting, wait until you hear what I have to say next about the state of the NHL next.

Later