technoculture314-09

Since more and more people take the advantage of free downloading these days, whether the copyright should be more restricted in the 21^st century is a major discussion. It is relatively difficult to absolutely conclude that the change of the copyright will minimize the piracy issue for sure. Issues are likely minimized if the sections are set toward more criminal way that the action of piracy is seen as a sense of killing the intangible goods. It means that if people are downloading music albums for free, it is a way of “killing” the artists’ careers since publishing albums are their jobs and they gain profit from selling music albums. Thus, restricting copyrights might be a way of reducing the piracy issues if the rules are set into a more serious way.

On the other hand, the restricting of copyrights might not make any changes to the issues at all. Laws are set for the people who are obeying the rules. If those minor groups of people are already following the old copyright rules, they will be keeping following the rules no matter what. The rest of the society who are not the better citizens will keep doing what they have always been doing. There is the possibility that some people maybe more careful when they are downloading, but after all, they still have the intention to “steal” the artists’ works. Therefore, restricting copyrights might not seem to be working and artists’ may have the risk of losing the recognition of the public.

The conflicts in whether managing the copyright in a different way always exist. A better way of solving the problem is to set an amount or percentage of downloads. However, this may only seem to work in countries like New Zealand since we have the limitation on the Internet speed that downloading too much may reduce speeds. Large countries like China and USA do not face the problem of Internet speed limitation.