Alright now that I have a true topic that will make a decent paper, I need to define it properly. In order to do that I need to figure out my exact stance on the issue.

My thoughts on piracy have many different angles, but with the current day in age I think it is approiate to focus on multimedia because it is the most widely know and easily relatable.

So my stance is that piracy hurts all. Honestly when someone downloads a song, they hurt both the artist and the record company who lives of the sale of the music in question. During that illegal download they do not receive any royalties from that stolen copy nor do they truly gain anything.

It is hard to compare piracy to stealing because in the act of stealing there is only one object and someone is taking that object away. In the realm of computer it is easy to make a perfect copy of the object and take that copy. How can you put a price on something that can be duplicated? What exactly are you stealing online if there are infinite copies? What is gained or lost through this art?

I guess what I could focus in on how I believe that there should be an alternate way to support the shows or artists that you enjoy. An example of this would be music. I know that iTunes takes money off the top for hosting the files and providing the payment services etc, then the record companies take their cut for distributing the music and adverting the band. When the money reaches the artists bank account it is most likely a very small sum that they are actually able to spend.

It seems to me that there should be another way to support an artist or movie producer rather than buying the finished product. When it comes to shows or artists that I love, I would love to just put money directly in their pocket for what I enjoyed. I always buy T shirts, posters, toys, etc from my favorite things, but it is incredibly tempting to go online to listen to a song or movie that is really hard to buy or find.

With services like Spotify, Netflix, and Hulu it is much easier to get content for free that supports everyone involved, but there will always be those off the wall shows and artists that it is too expensive to purchase. When it comes to purchased copies from places like iTunes or Amazon, they always have some sort of DRM on them that requires a certain player and almost punishes the user for purchasing that content.

Such a complex issue...