Daily Star Sunday – Is my brother a Pirate?
Is my brother a pirate?
The news that the record industry is closing down on illegal music downloads at first sight seems like a good idea… I agree that illegal downloading is on a par with stealing - after all, the music industry is in such a bad state at the moment. Artistes are being dropped every week and really talented singers are failing to get signed. We have recently started including official download figures into our weekly single chart because sales for singles were at an all time low. So I agree that illegal downloading of music is wrong.
But we need to look at the way in which we fight this problem. And I am appalled that some normal families have received demands for £2500 because their children have been sharing music files on the Internet and downloading songs illegally. For a start, it simply isn’t clear what sites we are allowed to use and those that we should stay clear of, there is plenty of advertising out there telling us to go onto sites and download, but I haven’t seen much telling us that it is illegal. My mum doesn’t even know how to turn the computer on, so how on earth can you expect her to know that downloading music is illegal…
So why on gods’ earth is the record industry’s trade body, the BPI, branding the innocent music listener as a crook? Surely a better idea would be to let us all know what sites we can go onto and what ones we can’t. We need to be educated on this new downloading craze – because unless our Granny is mystic meg I really don’t see how we are suppose to know!
And what better way than to target the schools, after all most of the music downloading is done my young people. All we would need to do is include it in our schools computer lessons or even maybe a TV commercial would do the trick. It doesn’t take a genius to work out!