2008-02-20 #1

Må møte behovet for å laste ned

Dear FBI, after watching your segment this evening on downloading illegal music i was disappointed at how it failed to represent a growing minority.

FBI did balance the program by the emphasis how users valued the usability of downloading music whether illegal or not.

But FBI failed to balance between what is legal and what is ethical. There is a growing movement amongst people, especially young, that believe that there is no such thing as illegal downloading, that it is infact only sharing. This has been re-enforced by politicians (eg in both sweden and france) now, there's even a political party in sweden fighting for the rights of users to share.

This movement comes with a lot of common sense. For example:

• looking at the history of copyright we see that it was intended to protect authorship, not to diminish ownership,
• we are brought up by parents, kindergarten, and schools instilling in us that sharing what we own is a positive attribute,
• for thousands of years, music has been freely shared and performed and this exists in every culture,
• we know that artists always make most of their money through the sale of the 'experience' and not of the medium. Artists make most of their money from concerts and performances. An artist (with less than 5 records) makes between 5 and 25 few cents per record sale.
• copyright as we know it today has been grossly exaggerated by the film and music industry to maintain their income selling an outdated medium,
• recent surveys have shown that active 'pirates' are the people that buy more CDs, in essence they are the people who most actively listen and experiment with new types of music.

So as a user that regularly downloads illegal content, and genuinely believes that it is not unethical, i know that by donating $10 a year to my favourite artists, which i do, i'm giving those artists the money they would have received from between 40 to 200 CD sales! Furthermore i'm refusing to fund a technically redundant establishment that is suing society's children for doing what they were taught to do: share.

Think about when you were children and used to record your favourite songs from the radio onto cassette tapes and make composition tapes. This was illegal copying even back then but could you ever imagine being sued for it? It was believed in society that it was not really illegal until you turned such practise commercial, ie you started selling your composition tapes. What has happened in the last 30 years? An establishment is threaten and is trying to stop the advancement of technology for the general public. The whole story is as ridiculous as if photo-express shops started suing people for printing out at home their own photos.

i hope you can appreciate the growing population of users that believe their exists no such thing as piracy.

sincerely, michael semb wever.