Piracy?

A few days back I noticed the soundtrack for my showreel which was uploaded in Youtube had been removed because of copyright infringement. And I felt it was time for me move on to some other video sharing webiste.

Here is good take on this topic..

In 2002, the RIAA(Recording Industry Association of America) reported that CD sales had fallen by 8.9 percent, from 882 million to 803 million units; revenues fell 6.7 percent.[12] This confirms a trend over the past few years. The RIAA blames Internet piracy for the trend, though there are many other causes that could account for this drop. SoundScan, for example, reports a more than 20 percent drop in the number of CDs released since 1999. That no doubt accounts for some of the decrease in sales. Rising prices could account for at least some of the loss. "From 1999 to 2001, the average price of a CD rose 7.2 percent, from $13.04 to $14.19."[13] Competition from other forms of media could also account for some of the decline. As Jane Black of BusinessWeek notes, "The soundtrack to the film High Fidelity has a list price of $18.98. You could get the whole movie [on DVD] for $19.99."[14]

But let's assume the RIAA is right, and all of the decline in CD sales is because of Internet sharing. Here's the rub: In the same period that the RIAA estimates that 803 million CDs were sold, the RIAA estimates that 2.1 billion CDs were downloaded for free. Thus, although 2.6 times the total number of CDs sold were downloaded for free, sales revenue fell by just 6.7 percent.

There are too many different things happening at the same time to explain these numbers definitively, but one conclusion is unavoidable: The recording industry constantly asks, "What's the difference between downloading a song and stealing a CD?"--but their own numbers reveal the difference. If I steal a CD, then there is one less CD to sell. Every taking is a lost sale. But on the basis of the numbers the RIAA provides, it is absolutely clear that the same is not true of downloads. If every download were a lost sale--if every use of Kazaa "rob[bed] the author of [his] profit"--then the industry would have suffered a 100 percent drop in sales last year, not a 7 percent drop. If 2.6 times the number of CDs sold were downloaded for free, and yet sales revenue dropped by just 6.7 percent, then there is a huge difference between "downloading a song and stealing a CD."

It all started with Napster and its amazing where file sharing is stands after 10 years.

“Napster changed the idea of music as something you paid for to being something that was free,” Mr. Usher said in an interview. “It took a whole industry that had its infrastructure built up on making, delivering and selling a CD – a piece of plastic – and it took away the piece of plastic. And without that piece of plastic, you can’t support that pyramid of infrastructure that you no longer need when you deliver for free.”
David Usher, lead singer of the Vancouver rock band Moist

For established musicians who came up through a system built on record sales, radio play and landing the cover of Rolling Stone magazine as measures of success, Napster and file sharing shook the foundations of their world. But for emerging artists, and for a generation of kids who grew up plugged into video games, computers and the Internet, digital media leveled the playing field

Its very clear that due to file sharing nobody is losing out on anything expect few people like major recording companies or film production companies can't hit their more than cent percent profit targets.

Anyways I just embrace the free culture because that is the only way all of us can evolve into better human beings who will be able to do what they love and do it freely. Finally this is what Shawn Fanning who is the creator of Naspter gotto say...

“I’ve never really been concerned with [my own legacy] especially how it relates to the press,” he said. “I mean, I was writing software because I loved writing software. Writing software is a pretty anti-social thing as well. So [a legacy] is not something I tend to think about, I just tend to focus on doing stuff that I enjoy, that I feel good about and I just love creating things, and wherever that takes me, it takes me.”

Its interesting to note that he single handily wrote the whole software code when he was only 18 for sharing music with his peers in college.

Source 1 : Free Culture: Version 2004-02-10
Source 2 : Thank You Napster, Matt Hartley Technology Reporter, Globe and Mail Update, May. 19, 2009