Piracy, Morals and The Need for Change

He then asks the public whether they think it’s wrong or not.
Normally the more extreme the examples are, the more hands are raised,
but when he spoke to an audience of 500 college students, something
different happened.

Finally, with mock exasperation, I said, “O.K., let’s
try one that’s a little less complicated: You want a movie or an album.
You don’t want to pay for it. So you download it.” There it was: the
bald-faced, worst-case example, without any nuance or mitigating
factors whatsoever. “Who thinks that might be wrong?” Two hands out of
500.

Pogue was blown away by this response, and he realized that there is
a clear generation gap when it comes to copyright morals. Indeed there
is, but what else do you expect from a generation grew up with iPods,
CD-burners and the biggest copying machine ever invented (the Internet)
at their fingertips. There’s a whole industry built around filesharing,
take the 160GB iPod for example, any idea how much it costs to fill
that with legally purchased songs?

A recent study has shown that people don’t buy less CDs when they
download songs, instead, they discover music they otherwise wouldn’t
have listened to, and buy more CDs than people who don’t download. On top of this, research continues to show less popular artists actually profit from piracy simply because it allows people to try new music.