Day 1

Von Hit

            Today is the start of a debate that goes much deeper than people think it does. The controversy of file sharing affects millions of lives and millions of dollars. It constantly takes money away from hard working artists by making their art and masterpieces available for free to the public. My hit singles have hit top 10 on iTunes and I’ve enjoyed much success over the years. However, that success is withered thanks to file sharing music programs such as Napster and Limewire. People can download my songs for free which for most artists is bad but in my case is devastating. Napster’s Shawn Fanning tries to argue that it’s the record companies that are most upset about all this since they want to make a dime off the artists (Jost 2000). This isn’t true, I am here today to show that I am the one that is upset and that I am the one suffering the consequences of letting people share free music. The main problem for artists like me is that I will probably not be in the industry as long as others with only a few singles keeping me afloat. There are a lot of laws about this whole thing that get in the way of the big picture. Laws such as the Audio Home Recording Act and Digital Millennium Copyright act (Jost 2000). None of this legal stuff should matter; it is an injustice to give people’s art away for free. Napster’s file sharing community has enough recordings to rival any institutional collection in the world (Jost 2000).  These types of companies should be shut down. It is ridiculous that a company has access to that much music that they let people share for free. Please be on the side to abolish file sharing, and do a lot of artist’s justice.

The Underground kids

            File sharing is one of the most revolutionary features that a computer can have today. We make a lot of music and it is something that we love to do. We want people to hear as much of our music as they can so they will be turned on to what we do. In our eyes it is common sense, when people hear your music and like it than they will want to hear more. This concept is especially beneficial to us. Fourty nine percent of people ages 12-22 say that they download music off file sharing sites as opposed to 54 percent of 23 years or older who say they do not and 34 percent that say they are not even online at all (Greenblatt 2003)! Our music appeals to young people who have the greater percentage of downloading our music. Perhaps our opinion is a little skewed since we do not have a record label concerned with our sales. We’re unsigned right now but we do produce albums and we do fairly well for ourselves. Let’s put it this way, we are losing less money letting people download are music for free than we would if a record label was collecting their 30 percent cut (Greenblatt 2003). Any artist that argues that file sharing should be eliminated is clearly brainwashed by record labels and big music selling companies. After everyone takes their cut for selling music produced by an artist under label contract, the artist’s cut comes out to about 12 percent (Greenblatt 2003). Think about how much one song costs on a site like Amazon.com, about a dollar, the artist gets 12 cents of that. Artists shouldn’t be crying over losing money to file sharing they should be asking record labels to take less of a cut and start loving music making instead of money.

MP3 Company CEO

            The music industry has dawned a new era in the way people listen to music these days. My colleagues and I are reaping the benefits of a more advanced music and technology industry. Why clutter your car with millions of CDs and worry about changing them all the time? Why carry around a bulky CD player that is unreliable and tacky? Mp3 players carry much more music and are much more mobile. We’ve been accused of promoting illegal file sharing since our program makes it easy to convert Limewire songs to mp3 files to put on our device. We are not responsible for record company losses. Mp3 device sales are at an all time high. One in five Americans over the age of 12 and now own an mp3 device and one in twenty now own more than one (TEMPO 2006)! We are all for music sharing and do not believe that it violates any rights. People should be free to share files and take advantage of the technology we have available in this day and age. What kind of society would we be if we didn’t take advantage of the most advanced technology we had available? We must advance in technology not hinder what we have already created. We can also argue that most songs aren’t even available on sites or programs that sell music. People can’t get all the music they want on their Ipods that only allow you to download through iTunes. It is absolutely ridiculous to think that you can’t have certain music available to you for sale. We say if a company doesn’t have something available than why should people not be allowed to go get it elsewhere. In conclusion we are on the side of “for” for file sharing. We believe it will help America grow as an advance society.

Itunes Rep

            We are living in a selfish and unjust society. Our sales are at an all time low and companies are beginning to lose their trust that music sales are the way to go. In recent years NBC Universal has ripped a lot of material from our program (Wireless innovator 2007). In recent years we have also had to raise our prices due to the decrease in sales that illegal file sharing causes.  We believe these companies should be taken for all they’re worth since they have stolen a lot from artists and record companies. Apple believes that copyrighted music should be contained and controlled to a point where artists are getting their just rewards. We are not at all promoting our own self worth; we want to provide an outlet for artists to create music and a living for themselves at the same time. The fact of the matter is, file sharing is illegal and should be shut down immediately and forever. File sharing doesn’t just hurt the music industry; it hurts the movie industry as well. DVD’s are encrypted with codes to not let them be copied or sent to other people and these programs crack the encryption and distribute the DVD’s. If production companies wanted their DVD’s to be distributed for free than they wouldn’t even create the codes on the DVD. People argue that iTunes doesn’t have all materials available or that our material is overpriced. The fact of the matter is if we don’t have something available it is because the rights to it are not for sale (Wireless innovator 2007). If the rights aren’t available that is the artist’s choice and they probably have a reason for why they don’t want people to have it. iTunes is clearly against file sharing and we will do anything to assist in the elimination of file sharing completely