Piracy Podcast

In our Piracy Podcast, all the artwork and audio we used were under fair use. We created the vocals and artwork ourselves and the music at the beginning and end was in the public domain.

While researching piracy and hearing about it in class, I've realized how completely wrong downloading copyrighted music for free is. It is stealing and takes money from the artists that we love. Downloading music legally, buying it online or getting music from the public domain, however is completely fine. It is great that artists' work are protected by copyright laws. Otherwise, they would probably lose hope. The music they worked so hard to create wouldn't be making any money because people would only download it for free. They wouldn't be able to keep record deals or jobs or anything. I just tried to think of extreme anti-piracy precautions they could take (like taking everything away from a digital medium and going back to vinyl) but then I realized that nothing could stop the distribution over the internet (because you could record the sound into a digital file and distribute it from there). This is why piracy is so prevalent in our society; people are so used to entertainment at the touch of a button. They don't want to pay for music, no one has ever wanted to pay for anything, and have it readily available over the internet.

I've really learned a lot about copyright infringement and piracy in this class, not so much what's legal and what isn't, but the consequences it has for offenders and artists who have their work pirated. I mean, I would be rather miffed if someone used our podcast for anything without permission, especially if they claimed it as their work, and especially if they were making money off it without any payment to us.