Moeed

Piracy is a big issue in today’s changing society, especially with the advances in technology, which brings many things to our fingertips in a measure of seconds. Piracy is an issue that is based on one’s morals and beliefs about and importance of the item being pirated. Piracy can be defined vastly but in recent times has come to be most closely defined as “ the unauthorized use of another's production, invention, or conception especially in infringement of a copyright” by the Merriam Webster Dictionary. With information available at our fingertips and access to high speed internet, file sharing, a method used to practice piracy, has become a means for many to obtain copyrighted software, music, and movies worth anywhere from a few dollars to a couple hundred for free. This is a controversial issue that has many sides to it. There are those that believe that it is completely wrong, which consists primarily of industry owners such as the CEO of Microsoft or Apple and other software producing CEO’s and business directors. Again these people have the right to say that it is wrong because it is through their software and marketing schemes that they became billionaires, and it is their original work that is now being compromised. But then there is the opposing side to this which is poor, working class people and some middle class people too who cannot afford the software, and also cannot live without it. Again they raise a moral question, which is that the software manufacturers set such high prices on items and that is completely wrong. However, a scheme that is possible to use is too make part of the price into a donation. We can argue if that is morally correct or not to use donations to play with people’s minds to get them to purchase the product. The loss for music artists is greater because their music is their major source of income, and often times they are not working for big companies. It is much easier to pirate music than other larger files because these files are often very small in size and most people can download them in less than a minute. Does the accessibility of these files give us the right to download the files? Research on the issue should be pretty easy because it is such a controversial issue. I will primarily use JSTOR to find scholarly journals and hopefully ProQuest Research can also be used to find some journals but from my searches it also includes some biased news articles and editorials on the issue. These can be used to weigh in on one side, whereas the JSTOR articles can be used to get an analysis of the issue. I will most likely analyze the writings using the //Five Analytical Moves// strategies that were given in our //Writing Analytically// textbook. After analyzing the issue I also want to bring in Open Source Software that has recently come into the mainstream and is an alternative to paid software, but is still not widely used because it is often different from what people are accustomed to.

What about things like Napster where individuals pay for it but arent paying for the music directly? Does this also have to do with the informational age where everything has to be instant and at ones fingertips at all times?

What would be some other altunative in gettin free movies and music without stealing it? is there some type of way to shut down all source that allow people to download illegal things?

Moeed Chohan J. Haynes WRT 105 Nov. 29, 08

**Mini-Dialogue Assignment** 1) Gilles Grolleau, Co-author of a journal article on piracy: "Please do not pirate it, you will rob the poor! An experimental investigation on the effect of charitable donations on piracy. " 2) John Carr, author of "A Torrent of Textbooks” in //Information Today// 3) Rendall Stross, author of “First It Was Song Downloads. Now It's Organic Chemistry” in //The New York Times// 4) Me

Everyone is sitting a room discussing piracy in the Information Age, and how it has become an unsolvable issue today.

Me: Well, with today’s increasingly technological world, Information has become accessible at our fingertips. No matter what we need, we can always find it. There is an overflow of information out there. With this increase in technology people have started to pirate many things and this has sparked many authorities attention. What do you guys think about piracy?

Rendall Stross: Yes, this increase in technology has certainly hurt the market for many products, and the list just keeps expanding. Online file sharing has made all this possible. And if it weren’t for the increase in technology we would not have the fast internet connections that make this process even easier. The most common form of piracy is music and movies but this is changing dramatically. In recent years, we have seen that college students have started sharing college textbooks online. This is a form of getting to the college textbook manufacturers and protesting the high priced textbooks and cunning techniques used by them in order to get sales.

John Carr: The increase in technology, along with a blend of the new generation makes file sharing a popular trend in society today. Teenagers and college students today are very well accustomed to using computers as well as other technology. Another trend we usually see in teenagers is that they are usually rebellious. It is this connection with rebellion that has led the college students to put textbooks online. These students take desperate measures to get their point across; they scan every single page of a textbook and then put it online. This is a process that is very time consuming, because scanning hundreds of pages can take many hours. This shows the measures they are taking to get their point across.

Me: It seems as if thought piracy should be seen negatively, however, because it is becoming such a popular cultural phenomenon it doesn’t seem so wrong. So would you guys support or disapprove of piracy then?

Gilles Grolleau: Well this goes into the argument I made in the article I wrote for the __Journal of Socio-Economics.__ Just by reading the article you can get my viewpoint on it. Piracy should not be done because not only does it hurt the manufacturers of the product but it also hurts the poor. Again these poor are not those who cannot afford to buy the software but those that get donations from these corporations because of people that go out and buy the software. A small percentage of the profit from each sale goes towards a donation that the manufacturer of the product has decided to donate.

Me: So the manufacturers of the product basically link the product with a donation in order to get people to buy the product. Some could easily see that as a form of propaganda and others may think the manufacturer does in fact have morality. I can see this as an issue for music, but still college students are considered “poor”. They pay thousands of dollars to go to college and then realize they have yet to pay for textbooks, which in some classes are bought and then never used.

Rendall Stross: Well that is why these college students are taking these drastic measures of going through the hassle of putting textbooks online. It may help others who need the book and at the same time get to the book manufacturer in order to lower the price. There is no question that piracy is wrong but when things are so overpriced that not everyone can afford them, I believe that it goes to question the manufacturers. If they lower the prices on such commodities they might be in for more sales and a more pleased consumer base. However with the informational age right now, would it stop piracy?

John Carr: I certainly think that the manufacturers lowering prices would decrease piracy. After all it is the overly priced commodities that lead people to share the item digitally. For music and such it would not be reduced as much as it would for textbooks. This is because music is easier to file share than textbooks. I’m sure if textbooks were somewhat cheaper a student could make better use of their time than spending hours scanning the item.

Rendall Stross: Well getting back to the question earlier about propaganda, I believe that textbook manufacturers are using a method of propaganda now to combat piracy and in order to get more sales. They started releasing more and more new editions of textbooks and then started placing online access cards to go along with classroom learning. Professors are not very keen of this but use it anyway in order to get their commission on textbooks, especially older professors who are not as tech savvy. This is certainly an inappropriate way of dealing with textbooks and greed for money. Therefore, in this case piracy may be the right thing to do in order to get your voice out there.

Gilles Grolleau: I would agree with you on textbooks but certainly on the case with music I would have to disagree. Musicians are very well known to donate to causes that affect the needy or even other societal causes that lead to positive change. If people keep pirating their music, they will not get the same amount of sales and therefore will have less to donate. It is still surprising that these musicians even with millions of pirated downloads still have money that they are willing to donate.

Me: Yes, we can see that musicians are certainly very generous in their donations. A good example would be the Live Earth Concert that took place last year. Millions of dollars were donated in order to help stop global warming.

Rendall Stross: Well that is an interesting point that I would have to agree on. I know for textbooks they have come out with e-books which can be bought and then downloaded. This is the digital form of textbooks that is legal. However these books are locked with certain encryption which disallows it from being shared. We know that textbook manufacturers don’t have such donations available. In order to help the musicians we should come up with a way of encrypting music in order to stop it from being shared.

Me: True, it would be quite a day when people stopped sharing such music and acquired some morals. We shall wait for piracy researchers to come up with such a thing. This would certainly help out the battle against piracy.

Gilles Grolleau: Well, I’m glad that we all agree that piracy is wrong, but certainly there are things that could be done to reduce piracy. This part lies mostly on manufacturers of the product themselves. We all need to change our views in order to have a more equal and peaceful world without such legal battles.