CD Piracy

While the music industry worldwide is losing their sleep on the issue of illegal CD duplication, the scene at New Zealand speaks something else. The proposal is to alter the existing copyright laws (granting fair use rights). In other words, it’s making CD piracy legal.

Let’s hear what Michael Glading (New Zealand chief, Sony Music) has to say about it.

“At the end of the day, you’re sending a message that it’s okay to copy, and that is going to kill our business.”

Fair use rights, no doubt, are a plus point to the US consumers who enjoy making a certain number of copies of legally purchased audio/video for personal usage. But New Zealand and UK have no such rights; it is even illegal at these two places to rip a CD for playing the same in an iPod.

But none is going to buy two different copies of the same CD for home and for the car; the New Zealand government understood that part and is going to change the existing copyright laws. But what happens if a person has not bought legally a composition and claims the original copy to be lost? It’s perfectly all right in that case to use a copied version of the same. The music industry is currently afraid of such incidents.

• What is CD piracy?

Contrary to the popular belief, copying a CD or DVD for personal usage is not an act of piracy; selling these copies without the explicit consent of the copyright holder for the work is. Digital technology has added fuel to the fire, but one cannot blame CD piracy entirely upon it. The policy the music companies practice can be held responsible up to an extent; unless the prices are kept low (especially in the third world countries), CD piracy can’t be stopped completely.

One may also blame the advent of broadband Internet connections. Together with P2P file sharing technology, CD downloading has also become a common phenomenon. Agreed that P2P enthusiasts do it only for the love of music, but the artiste loses his/her money. Therefore, this is CD piracy as well.

• CD Piracy Vs Legal Download

There have been blames going to the atrocious price for audio CDs; researchers have found the missing link between a thriving CD piracy market and the legal music industry. But what went unmentioned is downloading music also gives people an adrenalin rush; a large number of people are currently a victim to it. So, it seems that it’s possible to accomplish both the results at one go – making available downloadable music at a nominal price. The concept of legal download has earned accolades because of a number of reasons:

• Since downloadable music is just about the music i.e. there stays nothing like the printed sleeves, the media or the jewel box to incur the cost, prices are bound to come down, encouraging more people to buy compositions legally.

• In today’s fast world, keeping one’s musical collection arranged in a proper format is time consuming; on the other hand, it’s much easier to keep them arranged in a mp3 player.

The only glitch that lies here is to lock the music i.e. it cannot be stored on a media unless the license code is provided. We hope that technology shall soon become able to provide that as well.