Written in 2002, this was what dave used for his assignment. The assignment was to write on a certain debate, and debate with other people in your group who took the other side of the issue. Dave was put onto the “Against File Sharing” side for the debate, however, the things said in this article do not necessarily align with what dave believes. The points made in this speech would be from someone’s point of view (like the RIAA) that they would use against file sharing.
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File sharing services are nothing more than the carts that a shoplifter uses at a grocery store that has no security and employees that don’t care to look at what you’re doing. That’s how millions of people steal from the music, and other, industries, giving a negative effect to the sales of their products. File sharing directly affects the economy, as record sales for the music industry are at an extreme low. If these “shopping carts” are taken away for good, it will be a serious deterrent to the illegal sharing of files.
As the file sharing programs become more and more popular, less will actually want to spend money for what they can get, for a fraction of the cost, by downloading the items they want and burning them onto blank CDs, with no money at all given to the original producers. Its like the people that make the items are working for no money, which is basically slavery.
File sharing programs state they are not responsible for what their users download, even when they know that the law is virtually being broken with every download, and they take no serious steps, that go past words, to stop the illegal distribution.
In the past, file sharing programs connected users to users through a central server, and once these companies were closed because of that fact, they became sneakier, and made the “central server” its users, which is nearly impossible to close down millions of people’s computers, so then they won’t be liable to what illegal activities are happening indirectly because of them.
When file sharing programs use users as a server, they are mostly people using a connection at their college, because they have a lot of bandwidth to support the traffic of people downloading. These colleges are ending up having to pay larger and larger amounts for their internet connections because of this.
Having even one piece of something illegally downloaded, it is still, may I remind you, illegal. You can be sued for petty theft or even grand theft if you have enough illegal items on your computer. If you get convicted, then you’ll most likely end up having to pay a lot more than what you were downloading is worth. When it comes to downloading illegally, it’s a gamble.
File sharing does not only conflict with the law, but will impact society itself. Children are growing up thinking that music should be free, when it should not be free. Creativity will suffer, because fewer will be willing to take the risk of pursuing a music career. Moral issues also come into play, because you may not care that you’re stealing, but you still admit that what you are doing is wrong.
If file sharing is allowed to continue, many parties will miss out, such as: Struggling artists that have not made it in the big time and are just starting out, record industry workers which will most likely be fired because they can’t be supported by the record industry to keep them on the payroll, and record stores, which will lose almost all its business, putting many more out of work.
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Works Cited
Dalnas, Eric, Matthew Roloff, and Keith Jenci. File Sharing: A debate With a focus on trading MP3s. 4 December 2002. <http://www.mredkj.com/other/sharing.html>.
University of Alabama. 4 December 2002. <http://resnet.ua.edu/about/acceptuse.html>