"The information infrastructure makes private infringement of [intellectual property] rights vastly easier to carry out and correspondingly more difficult to detect and prevent. As a result, individual standards of moral and ethical conduct, and individual perceptions of right and wrong, become more important." p. 145
Individual perception of right and wrong become more important. That could not be more true. I was discussing this with my friends, about which of us felt it was okay to illegally download certain kinds of material. Personally, I have no qualms about illegally downloading anything - music, movies, textbooks, yu name it. If it's free and it's there, I'll do it. And I know I won't get caught, so who cares? Some of my friends felt differently, and felt that it is wrong. But their conscience has a price, and they end up paying, sometimes ridiculous, amounts of money for media that they could easily get free. iTunes, Netflix and textbooks would be one example. I feel that nowadays, especially in the digital age that we live in, information is not contained - it is fluid, liquid and everywhere. Copyright laws are antiquated and to some extent pointless because they are broken all the time. The music, the data, and the video is everywhere, and you can't control its spread. In fact, my copy of Image Ethics in the Digital Age that I am looking at as I type this is a PDF scan that a friend made and emailed to me in an attachment. I know I'm not the only one it was sent to, and I sent it to a couple friends myself. You can no longer contain media, it's everywhere. And I think that copyright laws will only be ignored more and more as people wise up to more inexpensive ways of getting the media that they want. Everything you want on the internet is there; you just have to be able to find it.
Dave Grohl (lead singer of the Foo Fighters) on copyright:
Thom Yorke (Radiohead) on piracy:
Anti-piracy circa 1992:
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