By Briyah Paley
Should we be afraid to download? It’s safe to say that most people enjoy music. What we don’t like is having to pay for it. Years ago, before the wave of downloading came crashing down on us, we bought CDs and even cassette tapes (remember those?). Then that genius kid, Shawn Fanning, developed Napster right here, on our very own campus. Other file sharing programs soon followed. I don’t need to brief you on all of the history, but fast forward to 2003 and now there are people being sued individually for downloading music off of their computer.
It doesn’t matter to the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) whether your sister, grandma or dog downloaded songs on your computer, you can get sued for thousands of dollars per song. So, now we have a problem. Do we have to get rid of all of our music? Do we delete Kazaa and pretend it doesn’t exist? Or do we keep downloading?
I don’t have the answers, but personally, I’m a little scared. I even caved in and spent $40 on the new Dido and Outkast CDs because I wanted the songs, but felt guilty about downloading them.
This is how the RIAA wants us to feel. They want us to be shaking in our winter boots so we’ll stop cheating them out of money. Not everyone will accept this.
Recently, two students at MIT came up with an idea. They have developed a system for sharing music within their campus that avoids the copyright laws. Keith Winstein and Josh Mandel came up with the idea to have a “music library,” which will play through the university’s cable television network. They call it the Libraries Access to Music Project, and they even received a grant so they could buy 3,500 CDs and the necessary equipment.
The project is legal because of the time periods in which broadcasting systems are allowed to play new music. I have a headache just thinking about all of the laws these two MIT students had to consider.
So what now? With our fast Internet connection and access to millions of songs online, I know that people are going to keep downloading. Some people think it’s wrong, while others think it’s completely fair. Due to the recent downloading craze, Virgin Megastore now has a huge $10 CD sale going on. Other music stores are also cutting back prices. But for a college student, even $10 for a CD can be unaffordable, and it doesn’t seem like a necessity when there are so many other bills to pay.
These days, computers come equipped with a CD burner. The computer company won’t tell you to use the burner for illegal purposes, but everybody knows that it’s possible to use it for just that.
Sure, no one will know if you’re listening to a copy of your roommate’s CD collection. But you didn’t pay for it, and therefore it’s illegal to have that CD. But, you say, your roommate borrowed a few dollars the other day, and then gave you this CD as a way of saying thank you. Isn’t that OK?
It doesn’t get easier. We’d better enjoy this time period while we can, because the RIAA is hopping mad and who knows what will happen next? Now they’re warning people that if they agree to destroy all their illegal CDs and files, they could avoid a possible lawsuit.
As more people are sued, I’m sure more ideas will come into play about how we can carefully trick the industry to give us our music when we want it, for as little as we want it and how we want it. Until then, I’m going to listen to the radio.
