Here is my portion of the paper. A little thin, but I wasn't going to rehash a long running and well documented argument.
I quoted the RIAA on their opinion and then followed up with this:
People, on the other side of the argument, fall into several categories. In my opinion, one of the most important is the concern over security issues. According to a Wired Magazine News (
http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,47552,00.html) article the RIAA attempted to have an amendment to the USA Act, section 815, an anti-cyberterrorism section, that would have exempted them from prosecution for hacking the computers of people they thought were sharing music. They wanted to be able to enter a person’s computer and disable file sharing capabilities and delete supposedly unauthorized content. This is a legitimate privacy and security concern. Peer-to-Peer file sharing is a legitimate platform for the exchange of personal files and data, but if a person happens to be using one of the proscribed file sharing programs, that person runs the real risk of having their computer invaded, or worse, crashed and data lost.
On the moral rationalization side of the argument, many people argue, and not without some merit, that the RIAA and the recording companies actually compensate the artists so little that they have no problem downloading music and then going to the concerts so that a larger percentage of the money goes to the artists themselves. While not an untenable position it still suffers from the problem of being illegal.
And lastly I’ll mention the people who will download regardless. They fall into two camps primarily. The first camp is composed of those who don’t care if it is legal or not and simply want their music. They know it’s illegal and don’t care.
The other camp is composed of the group of people who believe that all information should be free. It’s not a position I find to be defensible on several points. The relevant point here is that if it is given away for free then what is the motivation for producing it in the first place? Without some compensation for the effort and materials involved where does the money come from to pay for all of that come from?
For myself, I believe that the downloading of music is illegal. The personal use contract that is included with albums allows for a single copy to be used only by the owner for their use only and not for the purposes of financial gain. While there is no financial gain from sharing, allowing others to have copies of that album exceeds the allowed by the contract. I agree with the moral concerns about the rights of artists and their just compensation, or lack thereof. They receive a very small share of the price of an album. But that doesn’t make sharing legal.
As a long-time member of the internet and technical communities, one thing I have learned about computers and software is that the better mouse trap lasts only about a week. Every form of copyrighting lasts no more than a month before the reverse-engineering groups have a program to undo them. And in the most spectacular case, Microsoft’s Activation Program, they managed to break that and release it before the product even made it to the shelves. The internet is going to continue to be a thorn in the side of copyright, intellectual property, the Illuminati, and governments for a long time to come. There is presently no effective and practical means to encrypt data securely that can’t be broken or shared, and there isn’t one on the horizon either.
Recording Industry Artists of America
http://www.riaa.com
Wired Magazine
http://www.wired.com
The Cellar
http://cellar.org/