Legal Issues With Downloading Music or Video on the Intenet
Downloading music, films and videos using illegal P2P file sharing networks such as torrent sites is illegal in the United States in order to protect the copyright of the people who make and produce them. According to IBIS World, in 2006 an estimated five billion songs were swapped on peer-to-peer websites,and the entertainment industry claims to lose hundreds of millions of dollars every year in revenue as a result. While legal sites do exist, people should check them thoroughly before use.
Other People Are Reading
-
Copyright
-
Copyright law is designed to give authors and inventors the exclusive right to their works. Work done during the course of employment generally belongs to the employer unless there is an agreement to the contrary. In the case of music and films, the copyright belongs to the record company or film studio that produced the work. Illegal P2P file sharing sites, where users share things like MP3 music and AVI video files across a network and download them for free, are in breach of the law because copies are made of an author's work and shared without their permission. It is not illegal to make copies of a CD or DVD if the copies are not then distributed to anyone else.
Punishments
-
Copyright infringement is punishable by a jail term or fine. Under current U.S. law, there have been very few cases of punishments given to individuals using P2P sites. However a 12-year-old girl from New York was sued by the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA), along with 260 others, for downloading music from Kazaa.com, even though the family had paid a subscription fee for the service.
-
Legal History
-
P2P networking has long been a debated issue in U.S. law. In 2001 A&M Records successfully sued the Napster service on the grounds that its creator, then 19-year-old Shawn Fanning, had knowingly infringed the copyright law and had profited financially from it. Napster was a downloadable program that allowing users to share MP3 files over a network. The case marked a major step in U.S. law; it has since led to other successful lawsuits against similar file sharing sites.
Defences
-
During the A&M Records v. Napster case, Fanning used the defense of fair dealing, saying that his service only acted as a platform for other people to share files. Similar defenses were used by owners of the Pirate Bay website, who argued that web search engines such as Google could offer the same level of illegality by allowing people to search for copyrighted files to download. However, prosecutors said that just because other services may allow access to illegal material, it is no defense to say the Pirate Bay was conducting its service within the law.
Precautions
-
As a rule, if a user is not sure whether a site is illegal or not, she should avoid using it. Not only is there a significant legal danger from breach of copyright, there is also the possibility that files will contain malicious spyware or viruses. New bands may allow users to download music off their website for free, but it is advised that people get their files off a reputable dealer website to avoid risks.
-
References
Resources
- Photo Credit computer image by blaine stiger from Fotolia.com
