Pirating is a crime. Yes, the one where sailors get on enemy ships and rob the opposing crew of their treasure, but the other definition as well. According to Merriam-Webster, the definition of piracy relevant to today’s time is “the unauthorized use of another's production, invention, or conception.” In this case, pirating music.
You’re an average teenager -- one without a job, without a purpose, and about three hours’ worth of global homework. Nothing could possibly get you through this difficult time.
But wait! You hear that the new Kanye album, The Life of Pablo, just dropped! You rush to Spotify (because your pockets are empty and Spotify is free! -- as long as it’s not Premium), only to find the following disappointment-inducing message: …show more content…
Whether you decide to or not, TorrentFreak, a publication committed to delivering the most recent news about about “copyright, privacy, and everything related to filesharing,” estimates that for about 500,000 people, the answer to that question is a simple yes. In the few days after its release on Tidal, Kanye’s newest album was the most-shared on the popular Torrent site, The Pirate Bay, with over 16,000 individuals seeding the album. That means 16,000 people had the complete file and uploaded it for anyone to download. Music sales in the United States have dropped by over 50% since 1999, when file sharing was introduced. Every year, there is an estimated over 12.5 billion dollars lost in revenues, or sales. Out of this $12.5 billion, the estimated impact pirating has on the wages of all the average working people’s paychecks amount to an astounding $2 billion. When music is illegally downloaded, it not only hurts the celebrities, the big people, the music artists, the Kanyes -- it hurts ordinary blue-collar people. During music piracy, the content is acquired and dispersed illegally, causing income to stop and an inability for jobs to be supported. Due to the lost revenues caused by music piracy, about 70,000 jobs are lost annually in the U.S. alone. Pirating doesn’t just hurt the Kanyes. It hurts the large number of people working for the music industry as well, which includes songwriters, recording artists, audio engineers, computer technicians, producers, and many
You’re an average teenager -- one without a job, without a purpose, and about three hours’ worth of global homework. Nothing could possibly get you through this difficult time.
But wait! You hear that the new Kanye album, The Life of Pablo, just dropped! You rush to Spotify (because your pockets are empty and Spotify is free! -- as long as it’s not Premium), only to find the following disappointment-inducing message: …show more content…
Whether you decide to or not, TorrentFreak, a publication committed to delivering the most recent news about about “copyright, privacy, and everything related to filesharing,” estimates that for about 500,000 people, the answer to that question is a simple yes. In the few days after its release on Tidal, Kanye’s newest album was the most-shared on the popular Torrent site, The Pirate Bay, with over 16,000 individuals seeding the album. That means 16,000 people had the complete file and uploaded it for anyone to download. Music sales in the United States have dropped by over 50% since 1999, when file sharing was introduced. Every year, there is an estimated over 12.5 billion dollars lost in revenues, or sales. Out of this $12.5 billion, the estimated impact pirating has on the wages of all the average working people’s paychecks amount to an astounding $2 billion. When music is illegally downloaded, it not only hurts the celebrities, the big people, the music artists, the Kanyes -- it hurts ordinary blue-collar people. During music piracy, the content is acquired and dispersed illegally, causing income to stop and an inability for jobs to be supported. Due to the lost revenues caused by music piracy, about 70,000 jobs are lost annually in the U.S. alone. Pirating doesn’t just hurt the Kanyes. It hurts the large number of people working for the music industry as well, which includes songwriters, recording artists, audio engineers, computer technicians, producers, and many