The Rise of Youtube and the Causes of Internet Music piracy

Introduction
Sharing of illegal musical contents is becoming very popular nowadays. Sharing tools and many websites such as Kazza and Pirates bay are considered as a major source for downloading musical tracks and albums from the Internet around the globe. There are many reasons which have caused these illegal acts to emerge.

One of the possible causes is the high cost of some albums and concert tickets. Many musical concerts might ask for very high entry fee. Example of this is the ticket price of a local concert for an artist named Stevie Wonders at Yas Island which is set to a price of Dhs250!

Some CD and DVD packages might be little overpriced as well; however, several websites such as Amazon offer used CD albums while other websites such as iTunes offer cheap Mp3 tracks and albums for as low as 1$ ( 4Dhs).

Another possible cause is the diversity of tools and methods used by the pirates to publish the stolen and illegal material. Tools such Ares, Shareeza, and Kazza could be downloaded easily into your computer and use the P2P technology to acquire all the latest albums. The P2P (peer to peer) technology allows thousands of persons to share the same album and even allow the illegal users to comment on and rate these contents. There are several search engines created to find the illegal peers (distributors) such as torrentz.com website which connects thousands of violating sites. There are also several website where you can search for recorded musical events too. Several sites exist like YouTube where people can upload and watch HD quality full concerts for free with subtitles which make it more convenient for them than paying for the ticket money. Some people might also use forums and blogs to distribute such albums. Twitter (which is a blogging site) is an excellent source for the leaked mp3 tracks downloads.

A third cause of this major issue is the lack of moral and legal knowledge about this issue. For instance, many of the teens nowadays think that it’s not bad to download songs from the Internet. A recent study made by Barna group discovered that only eight percent of the sample of 1448 teenagers thinks it’s morally wrong to download music illegally from the internet (Ventura, 2004). As a result, several laws are enforced to protect Artist’s rights such as the UAE Copyright Law .These laws range from huge fines to impressments of copy-right violators, but these laws are mostly implemented heavily on companies rather than particular persons and this might seem quite disappointing.

As a conclusion, it’s hard to ignore the several causes that made some Internet users distribute copied music contents through the Internet. It will be better to educate these persons on the possible effects of their actions.

Bibliography

Moore, C. W. (2003, August 8). Is Music Piracy StealingRetrieved March 12, 2011, from Applelinks: http://www.applelinks.com/mooresviews/pirate.shtml

Stevie Wonders. (n.d.). Retrieved 03 12, 2011, from Yas Island: http://www.yasisland.ae/en/events-calendar/flash-events/yas-island-show-weekends/concerts/stevie-wonder-live-on-yas-island/

Ventura. (2004, April 26). Fewer Than 1 in 10 Teenagers Believe that Music Piracy is Morally Wrong. Retrieved 03 12, 2011, from The Barna Group: http://www.barna.org/barna-update/article/5-barna-update/139-fewer-than-1-in-10-teenagers-believe-that-music-piracy-is-morally-wrong