So yesterday, I posted a link that related (vaguely, I admit) to the topic of file-sharing - specifically, pertaining to music.
Now, this is a sticky topic, and it is best to tread lightly here. Just about everywhere in the world, the practice of file-sharing is illegal in some way, if not in the act, in the copyright infringements stemming from the act. It is also, by far, the one crime with the highest chance of "getting away with it", so to speak. Just about everybody between the ages of eight and thirty have done it at least once, and there haven't been many convictions.
Why is this? Why is it that with all the complaints about file sharing, there's a record high rate of committing the crime, and a record low rate of being charged for it? One could argue that it is because of the anonymity that the internet gives people (a topic I talked about once or twice). This can't be the case however. It's been shown many times that it is a simple thing to find out a person's IP address, and then find out their relative location from that (Wikipedia, for one, publicly shows a person's IP address when they edit anything). Any power looking to charge people with file sharing likely has better technology - plus the authority - to pinpoint an IP address down to the home address of a person. So no, that can't be it.
How about power in numbers? This seems a lot more likely, but it is not the full reason. Sure, millions of people file share, but that doesn't stop parking tickets.
The other reason that file sharing is so rampant without any charges is that the artists don't seem to care much about it. Sure, the artists need to make a living. But I find that most of the complaints about music file sharing comes from the RIAA and the record labels in it. The artists themselves have little or no problem with it, from what I've heard. Many of them just want to get their music heard, which I can relate to, being a very amateur musician.
In fact, there are some artists, like Kid Rock and Nine Inch Nails, that offer their music for free over the internet or just advise illegal downloading over the legitimate alternative. Which raises the question: why don't artists just do away with the record labels entirely?
I don't doubt that most of them would in a heartbeat, if it catches on. But even though there are a lot of us who download music, there is still a large market for CDs, and as long as they're making money off of that, they might not be in a hurry to do away with CDs entirely. I mean, you wouldn't turn down your salary, would you? Plus, there's the contracts that the artists have made with the record labels.
However, as the internet becomes more and more widely used, it is only a matter of time before record labels become obsolete, and artists sell their music (or maybe merchandise, as I saw in one Wired article) on one communal site/service, sort of like a YouTube for music (YouTube might even rise up to the plate to be that site).
And you know, that might be what the record labels are afraid of.
--------------------------------------------------------------
