by Sarah Beetham
Daily Targum
U-Wire
A long time ago, before any of us were born, back when rock and roll was just getting started and our parents were teenagers, a dollar was the standard price for an LP.
Now, decades later, that same music - and the new music of today - is packaged and marketed on CDs that are much more expensive by a very small number of powerful corporations.
As a response to this shift in pricing and availability and with the help of the Internet, file sharing services led by Napster and followed quickly by such services as Kazaa and Direct Connect, have provided listeners with an alternative way to obtain the work of artists.
Napster's legal troubles and the ever-increasing popularity of file sharing have led to a heated debate over the legality and morality of this practice.
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In his column from the Sept. 23 Targum, Nadeem Riaz takes the government view on the issue, making clear that he sees file sharing as stealing, and therefore unethical.
However, before we accept this conclusion as true, we need to examine why file sharing is considered illegal, who benefits, and how we as consumers and citizens should react to this issue.
The basis for declaring file sharing illegal is in copyright law, or more specifically, in a recent barrage of stringent laws laid out by the World Trade Organization known as Intellectual Property Rights.
IPRs allow individuals, and more often companies, to patent ideas, technical innovations and artistic creations. These patents are enforced globally, and have become the impetus for the recent crackdown on file sharing. At first, their worth may seem ambiguous, but examining the protections these laws have given to corporations makes the issue much more clear.
Powerful corporations in every country have used these IPRs to make money and to increase corporate strangleholds on the common man. They have extended to the point where companies copyright seeds that have been developed by generations of farmers for centuries, and then force the same farmers that were so instrumental in developing the product to pay royalties every year in order to plant their crops.
These laws have also caused the cost of prescription drugs to skyrocket, making it impossible for citizens of impoverished countries to obtain the medicines needed for survival. And, as we can see, they have empowered large music companies to lobby lawmakers into declaring file sharing illegal and placing high penalties on file transfers of copyrighted material even between friends.
So what good have intellectual property laws done for our country and our world? Well, they've empowered pharmaceutical companies to bleed every last cent out of those of us that do not have prescription drug plans.
They've given food giants like Monsanto the ability to destroy our small farmers and take control over food production all over the world.
And, oh yes, they've allowed music companies like BMG to charge extremely high prices for music products that we can't get anywhere else, and many of us can't really afford.
And is there anything we can do about it? Not really. Or is there? If we think about it, maybe services like Direct Connect are there to help us fight back. We might not have much say in the secret tribunals of the WTO, but with our money and our business, we control the markets, and we can send a message. The awesome thing about Direct Connect is that it builds a community and helps us all unite to send the message to record companies that we don't like what they're doing.
