Where is Piracy Taking Us?

With a whopping 60 hours of video content alone being uploaded to Youtube every minute, there is a phenomenal amount of content circulating the world wide web through the endless number of platforms allowing for user generated content uploads. Hence the evolving problem of piracy is constantly emerging and the response from the public has generated the interesting outcome to the way we interact with the thing that plays such a big part in all of our lives, the internet. 
Although a rather controversial issue, the Internet has propelled our society forward to be discovering and connecting in new and more advanced ways each day. Even the most moral have admitted to illegal activity through the ease of access the Internet provides. Yet on the other hand, through this constant sharing of content there are obvious problems recurring from the owners of the content who are not receiving their owed loyalties and credit.
The music industry is renowned for being the industry which has suffered the most from the development of P2P sharing networks like Limewire and uTorrent. With its ease and accessibility, Limewire turned the most moral of us into 'pirates' yet there was always that looming threat of a virus attacking your computer, however by the time most of us discovered uTorrent that threat had long disappeared into an archive of old wives tech tales. 
One of the music industry responses to this threatening sharing network evident on the internet has been to adapt reverse psychology and eliminate the guilt associated with illegally downloading and offering the artist's album for free but not before being prompted through a pop up saying pretty much that they are thrilled that you want to listen to their music and we only require that you pay as much as you think it is worth. This method has been successful on many accounts as it toys with the human guilt. Here is someone saying yes sure have our music, we would love you to have it. And then there is the hold on one moment, you realise we work our backsides off to give this to you, please feel free to give us something small back in return. AND IT WORKS. Perhaps Danny B sums it up the most succintly through his testimonial to Bandcamp.

Bandcamp is the best thing that's happened to music in the last 5 years. I find myself using Bandcamp almost exclusively as my website these days. Being able to set my own prices is great, the staff is helpful and responsive, and getting paid immediately is soooo much better than waiting months for a check savagely slashed by 30%.

 Through the lecture given on the topic of piracy, evidently there are multiple problems in the ways in which information is available so freely and in saying this is empowering people in ways they have not been accustomed to previously. As initially stated, given the phenomenal amount of content surfacing on Youtube, there are an unbelievable amount of law suits evolving from the apparent misuse of an artist's music that has not been pre-approved by the music label before it appears on a Mother's upload of a video of her baby dancing. It is when these stories surface for example this one which gets you thinking..."how far are people going to take this!?" However needless to say underneath the absurdity of it all, the problem is still there and what are we going to do to fix it? Is the modern answer SOPA laws? 


The final interesting point I found upon researching this topic stemmed from some research into Lawrence Lessig and I stumbled across a talk he conducted with Shepard Fairey. Fairey, who is the famous artist of the Obama HOPE poster. Offering free downloads on his website of his unreal posters, Fairey shares his views on piracy and where he draws the line on stealing. Lessig offers the interesting opinion on the piracy debate that...

It's an important line to try to draw, because some people think that this debate is between those who want to make money and those on the free culture side who don't think money should be earned by anybody anywhere. And that's not the decision, artists need to earn money to flourish and do their art. That's the purpose of the copyright system and an important purpose for the system to play. The critical thing is to draw the distinction between places where someone has been caught ripping you off and places where they have been inspired by you and to celebrate that inspiration.