The Music Industry & Piracy -- What is the Extent of Impact?

Introduction

Why Choose Piracy?
I choose piracy for 3 simple reasons. Firstly it interests me because technology is ever evolving; something at the top of the technological tree one year can be near the bottom the next. Secondly technology is growing at a faster rate now than ever before and finally I am in 2 minds about piracy myself whether it’s truly evil or if the media industry over charges for their products.

Furthermore I have chosen to research piracy because it relates to my course via the research I will have to perform as well as the effect it may or may not have on my production. Plus I am curious to see if anything they plan to implement whether being the Music Industry or Government could actually work.

What is Piracy?
First to understand this investigation we need to understand what Piracy is, and what it means for the music industry.

“Copyright infringement (or copyright violation) is the unauthorised use of material that is covered by copyright law, in a manner that violates one of the copyright owner’s exclusive rights, such as the right to reproduce or perform the copyrighted work, or to make derivative works.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy_(media)

To put it simply ‘Piracy’ is viewed as theft. Downloading music, videos, games or any other form of copyrighted material online is classified as piracy and therefore is against the Law.


Research

How to become a Pirate
Now you know in a sense what piracy is but you don’t know the methods used to complete it. Via looking through the Internet and reading a few key forums I came across a huge range of ways to download that latest single from ‘Take that’ for free. The beauty of many of these applications is that regardless of your technical ability there is one somewhere that you can use for your nefarious deeds.

Rapidshare and Youtube are both online websites offering 2 unique services. Rapidshare offers an online file hosting service where you can allow other people to download files you upload. For instance if you wanted to share a piece of art you had completed with your friend in Taiwan as well as your friend in Alaska but did not want to have to upload it to both of them separately you could just upload it to Rapidshare, pop them a link, and let them download it from there. However as easily as it is to share legal content on Rapidshare it is to share illegal content.

Youtube offers a streaming video service allowing you to watch the latest Music Videos or other people’s random recordings they’ve uploaded onto their accounts. While Youtube has some security to stop downloading of their music videos it can’t stop a user simply recording incoming sound from the website and then saving it as a .MP4 and adding it to their IPod.

Although both websites offer brilliant services and others like them such as Megaupload or Vinemo, they both offer very easy methods of gathering illegal content for free.

On the other side of the spectrum you have Peer-to-Peer programs where you allow other people to download files straight from your computer. Similarly to Rapidshare it enables people to share copyrighted content for free but at a slower pace.

Spotify and We7.com

Spotify and We7.com offer alternative ways to buying music. Spotify is a fully functioning application with advertises around the program as well as an advertising single or album every couple of music songs played. Similarly We7.com is an online radio station where you have a 10second ad played every so often.

What this enables you to do is choose your favourite songs from anyone and anywhere to create your ultimate playlist for free. Both options offer the benefits of listening to a radio station you control yourself with far fewer ads. Spotify also has a pay-monthly plan of £8.99 where you pay to remove all of the advertisements and get to listen to any of the musical tracks you want unlimited for free.

However while both projects are superb and offer people more reasons to not to use pirated singles they also help pirates gain an ever larger and better quality music. They both suffer from the same problem as Youtube, where a user can simply record their incoming sound.


While doing some more research I came across a BBC News post about how the British government plan to deal with Piracy, over a couple of weeks a few artists also felt they needed to voice their opinions on the matter. I feel that both opinions are correct to some degree however I lean more towards Ed O’Brien’s point of view.

The British Government released plans on how they were aiming to deal with the piracy problems at large. A key statement released was that:

‘Persistent File-shares could have their internet accounts suspended in an attempt to crack down on piracy’.

It is about time that the government stepped in to deal with the problem, but like the FAC (Featured Artists' Coalition), British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors and the Music Producers Guild I feel this action would be an overreaction. Ed O’Brien’s comment below sums up what I feel about the matter.

"It's going to start a war which they'll never win." - Radiohead guitarist Ed O'Brien

Regardless of how the government try to punish people for downloading files illegally it won’t stop them, even if ISPs (Internet Service Providers e.g. BT) stepped into help, I’d find it hard to believe that catching and recording illegal downloading will be possible. Simply because how will they manage to tell the difference between legal downloads and illegal downloads without going against people’s privacy rights?

However, 11 days after this statement Lily Allen stepped forward to rally stars against piracy. Taio Cruz, James Blunt and Tim Rice-Oxley all put forward their support to Lily as well as congratulating her for stepping up.

"File-sharing has had a very, very negative effect on my career, as it has on many others" - Taio Cruz

Taio Cruz is a prime example of how music piracy can be damaging, by having his debut album being leaked almost 3 months before the scheduled release date he and his music label were not sure whether to continue. The amount of money lost for both was most likely huge with many people downloading the album or songs before they were released.

So while some artists are strongly against punishing people for piracy others would like to see nothing but punishment after so much stress and anguish caused.

Questionnaire

Design & Subjects
My research questionnaire was designed to enable me to find out about 4 simple questions. Firstly how people acquire their music whether legally or not. If they knew how and if so what method of pirating they used and finally whether or not they felt that the current anti-piracy laws were enough.

Above you can see a graph showing you the percentage of varying ages who answered my questionnaire. I decided to keep those answering my question at an age range around the target of my Media Productions demopgrahic elsewhere in the course. This enabled me to create a larger questionnaire to send out in one sweep rather than 2 separate smaller pieces.

‘Acquiring’ Music
The graph on the next page shows you the answers I gained from the question on “How they ‘acquire’ their music normally” which aimed to find out if the highstreet is truly dying out like the Media Industry fears. From the graph it appears that the highstreet has lost popularity with just being tied first with 5 out of the 12 participants in the questionnaire. This shows us that ~58% now prefer other alternatives to going to highstreet and buying their music. This step can be explained however by the fact it is far more convenient to use the internet to get your music whether illegal or by using programs such as Spotify.

However with the options Highstreet, Internet D/L (download) and Streaming all being legal it seems the majority still prefer paying and owning their own music over illegal downloading. Out of those options it seems that the majority still using legal methods prefer owning a physical Album over the music tracks floating around in the internet ether of iTunes or Spotify.

But with just under half of the votes illegal downloading clearly shows the change in perspectives. If anything this graph shows us that the majority of people no longer own huge album collections but rather store their music on their computers or laptops. This in itself makes sense because with my demographic being of the age range 16-25 I would be greatly surprised if even 1 out of the 12 does not own a mobile phone of IPod that they use to play their music.

Illegal Download – Can you?
Interestingly only 8 of 12 (75%) knew how to download music illegally; from the previous graph of how people 'acquire' their music we can see that 5 of those 8 use illegal downloading as their main source. So even though downloading music illegally no longer requires such skill, especially due to programs such as Limewire making it exceedingly quick and easy, it is very surprising that not everyone knows how to download and use it let alone use it as their main source of acquiring music.

The graph on the next page was designed to find out what method of piracy people would use if they could. There are quite few methods to how you can go about downloading music illegally. The 4 mentioned are considered the main 4 methods and alternatives are normally based on these products.

I was surprised on how many within the group I asked use torrents because of the technical ability needed is far higher for them than either of the Limewire or Rapidshare users. Likewise those using Youtube would need to have a specific ‘Ripping’ program or an Audio recorder which most cost money.

Anti-Piracy Laws – Do they Work?

I am a firm believer that Anti-Piracy laws will never be enough, or in reality work, so I was very surprised when just under half of those I asked felt that they were enough. I expected more comments along the lines of "piracy laws don’t stop anyone from downloading music" or "They still haven't managed to prevent it at all" where as I got comments as "There's enough advertising to put me off".

So from this questionnaire it would seem that anti-piracy laws are at current not working.

Conclusion

How bad is it for the Media Industry really?
This is quite a hard thing to pin down. There are obviously a lot of debates going on with how serious the problem with piracy is, how harsh the punishments need to be to stop people actively using it as a source of their media products as well as whether you government has a right to intervene in the situation etc.

As the questionnaire results showed the problem with piracy the moment isn’t the fact the punishments are too lenient or non-existent it is because ‘pirating’ itself is far too easy for any novice to accomplish with a computer and internet connection. The increase of technology and the constant ‘dumbing’ down of tasks that take technical knowledge will more than likely increase the amount of piracy. A clear sign of this progression is with the Media task of creating a Music Video. As little as 10years ago creating a video even to amateur standard would nigh impossible without huge amount of effort. But now it is relatively simple to do.

What I can tell from the copyright laws in place now and the few reported cases of piracy is that the Media Industry at present is fighting a losing battle. Until they offer a stronger deterrent or an incentive to not partake in piracy people will continue. Even in cases where the law has been involved such as in with the PirateBay legal case due to the different copyright laws in certain countries, or even being non-existent, those sites can continue to live promoting piracy all the more.

However is piracy really going to kill the media industry? From my research I can safely conclude no chance in hell or heaven. If anything it will promote more security and better products to bring people into the real experience other that of a cheap pirated copy. Recently 3D technology has hit the big screen and with films such as Avatar bringing in £100,000,000s in profit my point is proven all the stronger.

Affect on Production
When beginning this project I didn’t think piracy would have much effect on my media products either with my production or ancillary texts. This is because Piracy is something which affects profit margins most significantly. From a educational perspective it would be absurd for it to damage my work.

However it has provided me an insight into what my audience feel with piracy and provided me a good opportunity to gain thorough opinions on certain subject matter I could use within my audience research.

Evaluation

Research
I feel the research as a whole was quite productive. By using a mix of sources from the BBC, forums as well as my constructed questionnaire I was about to look at a range of views on the piracy issue.

However in answering the question I feel I didn’t collect enough information to truly give perspective to the piracy issue and everyone it affects from the Artists themselves to the men and women creating art work on album covers to those purchasing the music. Piracy is a chance affect; a little damage at the top is an avalanche to those at the bottom.

Project
The project itself I feel was a success that it enabled me an opportunity to find out more about the media industry. However I feel it was a failure similarly to the research in the fact it did not truly give a full perspective of the piracy issue.

Bibliography

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8247376.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8266287.stm

http://cnsmediamt2.blogspot.com/2009/09/media-questionnaire.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement

http://www.webtvwire.com/why-the-pirate-bay-court-case-verdict-is-meaningless-file-sharing-will-soon-evolve/

http://courtblog.thepiratebay.org/

Media Investigation - [OLD]

This is the draft presentation, it is currently 2 long. However you can gain a very good idea of what I am hoping to achieve and explain from the 3 videos.

Musicians split when it comes ot Piracy...?

Recently the British Government have released plans on how they plan to deal with the piracy problem at large.

Persistent file-sharers could have their internet accounts suspended in an attempt to crack down on piracy

It is about time that the government stepped in to deal with the problem, but like the FAC (Featured Artists' Coalition), British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors and the Music Producers Guild I think this is in fact an over reaction. Not a heavy sledgehammer as the 3 musical bodies put it, but rather an atomic bomb.

"It's going to start a war which they'll never win."-- Radiohead guitarist Ed O'Brien

I myself am a small time pirate. I've spent time downloading music before going out and buying it due to having a very select taste. I also know that the chances of the government, even if ISPs (Internet Service Providers e.g. BT) stepped in to help, that catching and recording illegal downloading will be nigh impossible. That's without taking into account the difficulty of telling the difference between legal file sharing and illegal.

This is all before the fact that by doing this many people will most likely be put off music altogether and go for alternative types of entertainment as mentioned by the Radiohead guitarist Ed O'Brien.

[ Information from the BBC ]

However, 11 days after this statement Lily Allen stepped forward to rally stars against piracy. Taio Cruz, James Blunt and Tim Rice-Oxley all put forward their support to Lily as well as congratulating her for stepping up.

"File-sharing has had a very, very negative effect on my career, as it has on many others" -- Taio Cruz

Taio Cruz is a prime example of how music piracy can be damaging, by having his debut album being leaked almost 3 months before the scheduled release date he and his music label were not sure whether to continue. The amount of money lost for both was most likely huge with many people hearing, downloading and listening to the song for months before it came out.

Also like in the article it states that due to the label losing out on money it will also mean that they will have less to spend on supporting new artists, which while I don't feel it is damaging them the artists themselves do.

[ Information from the BBC ]

My own opinion on this situation is that Piracy is a bad thing, however they need to sort it out by moving forward in technology and time. Sites such as Spotify and Me7 are the starting point, however for a student such as myself who wants to listen to music on the move the chances of me actually wanting to listen to hugely long adverts is small. Spotify premuim is also a rip off in my opinion, £9.99 a month equating to £119.88 a year is to much for those who only listen to the odd song from an odd album.

Itunes is my current favourite legal way to obtain music, due to being cheap and enabling me to buy a single song off an album and not all those fillers. It will be interesting over the next couple of years to see what other unique ideas and concepts appear.

Media Questionnaire

Please tick the boxes as appropriate

Age: 15-17 [ ] 18 – 20 [ ] 21 – 23 [ ] 24 – 26 [ ] 27+ [ ]

Gender: Male [ ] Female [ ]

Which genre of music do you listen to the most?
E.g. RnB, Rock, Alternative, Emo etc.

Have you heard of the band 'Blighters'?
Yes [ ] No [ ]

Would a music video involving Skateboarding interest you?
Yes [ ] No [ ]

How do you ‘acquire’ your music normally?
Highstreet Shop E.g. CD at HMV [ ]
Internet Downloads E.g. iTunes [ ]
Illegal Downloads E.g. Youtube [ ]
Streaming Music software E.g. Spotify [ ]

Have you heard of Spotify?
Yes [ ] No [ ]

Have you heard of We7.com?
Yes [ ] No [ ]

Do you know how to ‘acquire’ music illegally?
Yes [ ] No [ ]

If yes what is your preferred method?
Recording off Youtube or Spotify etc [ ]
Torrents E.g. thepiratebay.org [ ]
Limewire or equivalent E.g. Frostwire [ ]
Downloading sites such as megaupload or rapidshare [ ]

Other please specify...

What technology do you use to listen to music?
MP3 / MP4 / iPod [ ]
CD Player [ ]
Radio [ ]
Computer / laptop [ ]
Mobile [ ]

Do you feel the current Anti-piracy laws are enough?
Yes [ ] No [ ]

Why do you feel this way?

Above you shall find my media questionnaire of which I shall be using for my media investigation.

Topic :
To what extrent has the use of Piracy impacted on the music industry.

Context :
I have choosen to look into how piracy is impacting the music industry due to it being closely linked to my generation. The modern technology, increased internet speeds, ability to download any type of music for free and listen to it on your own MP3 / Ipod has created a problem which copyright and the power that be are trying to address.

It is generally interesting to me because it will affect how I consume music for some time, whether it be legally or illegally. Downloading from Spotify or thepiratebay.org. The relevance of this research at this point in time is that it will show a wide variety of the different comsumer options to listen to music as well as the greater affect of piracy on the industry as a whole from the basics of music to the problem of fraud.

It is also interesting in the fact that this is the tip of technology, the tip of the iceburg.

thepiratebay.org gone for good?

Thepiratebay has been one of the biggest and most used torrent tracking sites in the world for over 3 years, ever since it's little debuckle with the copyright laws back in 2006. With thousands of musical tracks and other major content such as OEM versions of Mircosoft windows and professional software from Adobe and other companies totalling in the cost of billions across the entire site it is no surprise that governments, companies and many people wished to see the site burned.

Finally, after the original attempt to shut it down in 2006 by the Swedish government it seems that thepiratebay is being crushed. After the legal proceedings where the 4 founders were sentenced in April to one year in jail, and fined $3.6 Million Dollars, the piratebays main backbone ISP (Black Internet)was threatened with legal action if they didn't shut down. It seems that anti-piracy law where non-existent still carries enough threat to dislodge thepiratebay from Swedish ISPs even though according to Swedish law there is no such thing as copyright when enforced by another country.

Currently thepiratebay is still down, but it is highly doubtful they will be done for good due to being brought out for over $7,000,000 by a company looking to make the site legalised.

Extra info
3 hours after the Swedish court ordered the upstream provider Black Internet to block traffic to the site Pirate Bay staff announced that the site had been relocated, but due to technical difficulties they were prevented from coming online immediately. Due to DNS issues, depending on your host it will be how far you realise a domain such as www.thepiratebay.org has been moved, the website was only accessible from some areas.

[Last updated 25/08/09]

Anti-Piracy getting serious

Below is a story from the 25th of August.

Four men have been jailed in China for creating and distributing piracy software for Microsoft Windows XP.

The "Tomato Garden Windows XP" blocked the operating system's authentication programmes and enabled users to access it for free.

The software was created by Hong Lei, who was handed a prison sentence of three-and-a-half years by a court in Suzhou, eastern China, according to the state news agency Xinhua.

Another man was given the same sentence, and two others were jailed for two years in what was termed the biggest software piracy case in the country.

Hong and his accomplices distributed the version through a portal called tomatolei.com which made money through internet advertisements.

Although the case was widely publicised by China as a sign of its efforts to control piracy, many say more needs to be done.

US Congressman Howard Berman of California, who is in Beijing to meet Chinese leaders, said in a statement: "China's efforts to stop intellectual property theft have been weak and ineffective - heavy on tough talk but light on implementation."

As you can see anti piracy has started getting serious. This is one of the first serious sentences against piracy and the largest case of it's kind in China. Similar to the "thepiratebay" case this is a lethal message to all those going against the huge corporations such as Microsoft and making something worth billions of $$$ free via some clever coding.

Media investigaiton - Proposal

Topic :
To what extrent has the use of Piracy impacted on the music industry.

Reason for topic :
Interest and background knowledge on priacy and copyright laws.

What do you expect to find out :
About creative comms license, spotify, piratebay, rapidshare, Virgin Media etc.

How it will help me to develope my understanding for the year 13 coursework?
Relations of piracy to music in the modern world.

How will you express your findings?
Presentations, blog as well as video.

Ideas for research topics :
The Piratebay court case
Spotify
Virgin media + music companies teaming up
Latest technology affect on piracy (internet speed)
Access to illegal content
Accepted or looked down upon

Technology, how much do you know?

When I talk to most people they have many misconceptions about modern day technology, and only a very basic understanding of how the the Internet works. There are 3 major factors to how we, the consumers, access the technologies bounty.

1. Our ISP (Internet Service Provider) and their Terms & Conditions (TaC)
2. Our average Download / Upload speeds
3. Your Computers overall 'power'

Don't forget that I am a heavy internet user and that I take advantage of everything possible, for this reason I will have more gripe with these problems than an average user. However it will provide an insight into the problems that those who use such sites as "thepiratebay" or "rapidshare" suffer.

ISP's are either the savour or destroyer of your enjoyment of the internet. They control your top speed, whether you can download at all during peek times, if you can access certain sites and more. 'Peek time' is the annoyance ISP's provide, with the phone peek times increase the cost of calls however for ISP's peek time means a massive capping of your internet connection to generally 200kb. This only affects those downloading with a 2mb+ connection, others don't notice, yet I remember numerous times I wanted to watch a program on Sky Player or BBC iPlayer and *WHAM* my connection is slapped down from 900kb/s to 200kb/s.

Downloading speeds is one of the major misconceptions. Many people feel the higher the better, however once you reach around 8mb regardless of how much faster you go you won't see an increase in surfing speed (Except on heavily flash'd sites) or a better ping when playing games against people around the world whether on the PC or Xbox 360. Going above 10mb to say 50mb on fibre option broadband you'd be paying for something quite worthless to the average user. However for the 'pirates' you'd be laughing manically.

Computer power relates to how fast you're pc can process programs, now days this more relates to whether you have Blu-ray players or a surround sound system than CPU speed. This is due to most computers now having enough power to easily surf the web and run numerous word processing programs.

However when you put all these things together it can either mean you have a very quick method to access illegal content or you don't. The way human nature is, the easier to do something the more likely we are to do it.