Piracy.com
REPORTER: Sonia Kruger
BROADCAST DATE: August 9, 2002
Mr Blasina says downloading music is increasingly popular.
Download and jump aboard the online pirate ship. It's a free-for-all, with Internet sites such as Kazaa and Grokster offering any song, album or movie at the push of a button and the click of a mouse.
Before you log on, however, remember: you are breaking the law.
In a world ruled by piracy, Nathan McLay, a teenage online buccaneer, cannot remember the last time he or his mates bought a CD from a record store.
"Music is pretty expensive these days. It keeps getting more and more expensive and when it's available for free people are going to take that," Mr McLay said.
"If they really like an artist they might go out and buy their CD if it's got a good cover or if they want to read the liner notes and sing along but essentially, I think that the kids these days are finding that they'd prefer a cable connection or a DSL connection, because then they can get as much as they want."
Peter Blasina, publisher of Pixel Magazine, says downloading music has increased in popularity as software has become easier to use and hardware has gone down in price.
"What's happened is that the technology has become very easy to use but plus the peripheral devices that you can play the technology on, like MP3 players, have come down in price. They've dropped probably a third of what they were two years ago," he said.
"All you need to do is go to a website that has music stored on it. Select the track you want ... and it will download.
"Once it downloads to your computer it appears in your player. Then it's just a matter of double clicking on it and it will play."
Mr Blasina says downloading movies is so simple, even adults can do it.
"With movies it's really easy. What I did here was I downloaded a movie into my player and turned it on and you'll see, this is Men in Black playing full-screen and the whole movie has been recorded on a memory stick."
Copyright and entertainment lawyer Shane Simpson sees the downside of the free downloads.
"That particular demographic is now a generation that has been downloading its music for the whole of their teenage years and now have an expectation that that will be for free," he said.
"If you take away the record company or the producer's primary means of making a profit, that is necessarily going to filter down and affect the money that is earned by the artist."
And rock guru Glenn A. Baker says Internet piracy could spell the end of the classic rock album.
"In the end it's theft. In the end it's just the wholesale taking of goods that don't actually belong to you," he said.
"If everybody thinks they can get music for nothing, really the bands will stop making it, the record companies will stop putting it out."
So far, litigation has been the only weapon available to the authorities in their fight against piracy but new laws protecting music and movie copyright could make downloading detectable and a chargeable offence.
"They're going to have to find ways around it. They're not going to be able to stop it," Mr Blasina said.
That's the dilemma facing the Federal Government and the film and recording industry: how do authorities regulate Internet users or websites offering free downloads?
Websites such as
www.mp3.com, www.audiogalaxy.com and
www.mp3cafe.net are the top three for free music.
Or these top websites for video downloads:
www.music-e.net, www.gohip.com and
www.kazaa.com
Record companies are fighting back, setting up their own sites where you can legally download songs for a price.
But right now, users like Mr McLay say its all par for the course.
"The record labels - the major labels - largely they've been holding the ball in their court for several years and now things are starting to change and technology's caught up with them and they don't know what to do," he said.
