technoculture314-09

The RIAA have an aggressive stance on illegal downloading and it can be argued that 'Piracy' is just part of a 'moral-panic'.

The reasoning for piracy being illegal is the idea that the artists suffer, the idea of people getting taxed for illegal downloading then implies the artists should be getting the money, but this is not the case. The notion that people are downloading music for the share enjoyment of listening to it shouldn’t be classified as a crime especially when individuals are downloading artists only suffer economically and not a lot if any considering downloading is still contributing to the music industry. Stars are still born, songs are still becoming famous, and the free download of one song can instigate the purchase of the album, in-fact downloading may very well increase these factors and in some cases bring more money to the artists.

Companies such as the RIAA have an embedded 'moral-panic', and it is obvious from their website to see their studies have not done research on the groups of people who are those purchasing music legally. To reiterate the 'Norwegian Study' mentioned-in-class, they "looked at almost 2000 users, all under the ages 15. Researchers found those who download free music . . . were ten times more likely to pay for music". This emphasizes the idea of a 'moral-panic' rather than an entirely 'rational-panic' with music sales.

An article by Goldacre 'Illegal downloads and dodgy figures' reiterates this notion as it finds the figures for money loss in piracy as an "estimated" procedure, also stating that the figures themselves are dodgy, for example if an individual were to download 1 film it would be incorporated into the statistics as a 'sales' loss rather than a 'rental' loss.