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What do you think of when you hear the word pirates? Most people think of grungy, dirty sailing men who would have stopped at nothing to get what they want; several hundred years ago. The word pirate today however has taken on an entirely new image. Many normal people just like you and me have been branded as pirates by the multi-billon dollar music industry. In the past few years mass amounts of media attention, money and time have been poured into this controversial issue. But what is this battle about, who is fighting it, why is it a problem and who are the real pirates?

File sharing is a relatively new technological phenomenon that has been largely brought about by the now ubiquitous use of computers and the Internet. A file-sharing program allows computer users to connect with each other via the Internet and easily exchange music, pictures, movies and other such files. These programs are easy to maintain and can be found cheap or for free and most importantly are legal to use. However, some of the things that these programs can be used for are illegal. For example, the exchanging of copyrighted materials. This exchange is illegal because according to copyright law, only the copyright holder can distribute his or her materiel. As an example when a person downloads an album via a file-sharing network the copyright holder is most likely not consenting this distribution and is also therefore not making any profit off of it. Essentially, from a legal point of view, this is stealing also known as piracy. However most of the controversy on this subject has not grown from discussions about legality but money.

One of the biggest arguments against file sharing is that musicians are losing money because their fans would rather download songs for free than buy cds. This point has been pushed across very strongly by many of the biggest and most famous bands and record companies. In today's industry, musicians make their money by signing agreements with record companies, who then record, produce and distribute the artists' music. The artists then receive a certain amount of money from the sale of their music. Record companies have reported a drop in cd sales in recent years, which equals a drop in profits for musicians and companies, and have blamed this decline solely on illegal file sharing. However there are many other reasons that could also account for this decline in cd sales. Some of the biggest drops observed were

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