Sunday, February 27, 2005

Sharing Music Files

Many people, especially college students, are aware of the current situation in music downloading. While I am one of the few students not affected by the new rules and laws placed on downloaded music, I wonder what other people, especially students, think about the new laws. Usually, if I like a song that much by someone, then I probably like most of their other songs and will just buy the entire CD, so downloading a song or two usually isn't worth the effort of possibly being caught and having a suit for thousands of dollars filed against me as in the person from the included article. I believe that music downloading is probably tampering with the free market scale because so many poeople are getting the songs for free, that before they would have had to paid something for. That is why I believe it is good that the new laws of paying for the downloads have been put in place. What do you think?

1 comment:

Sergio Fajardo said...

The law suits are only applied in the United States. In my country, Brazil, everyone dowloads songs from P2P programs, such as Kazaa. So the opportunity cost is almost zero, since it is unlikely to be caught. And it is the same situation in most of the countries in the world. The companies can try to stop the illegal dowload of songs in the US, but they have a long way if they want to stop the illegal dowloads wordwide.