Facilitating Piracy

A tragic downfall of the cybermusic movement

Unfortunately, no account of music and the Internet would be complete without mentioning how the amount of piracy has increased drastically since music made its way into the cyber world. To summarize just how the combination of technology and music has facilitated piracy, I turn to Chris Gilby's explanation in "MP3 and the Infinite Digital Jukebox":

"When MP3 was developed, no real thought was given to the security of copyrights because the files were still quite large and modem speeds were slow. Copyright protection is an especially difficult issue with MP3s, since it is extremely simple to turn any digital file into an MP3 file. Anything encoded as an MP3 file can be copied without reference to the copyright owner… The result is that the MP3 is the initial salvo in a new Internet driven music revolution, and it is this that has the music industry extremely concerned." (3).

Soon after MP3s became popular and connection speeds got faster, "college students began posting large collections of MP3s on college servers and Internet Websites, where the songs could be downloaded by anyone" (5).

However, as large of a problem piracy may be, it seems as though musicians are not going to be living in card board boxes anytime soon. It is the record industry that has been hurt (5). In fact, musicians are actually ambivalent in regards to who is to blame for piracy as well as how to resolve it (6). Click on the thumbnail to the right to see a chart from the Pew Internet & American Life Project's survey"Artists, Musicians and the Internet," indicating musicians proposed remedies for piracy issues.

While the Internet has definitely been the cornerstone of music piracy, it has also been what has protected many musicians from the harmful effects. As we have seen in other sections of this site, the Internet has enabled musicians to connect with their fans directly, distributing MP3s and merchandise. The record industry has been handed the short straw, as the demand for CDs decreases.

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