For quite some time, illegal music downloading websites such as LimeWire have been the perfect way to escape paying for music. Many people argue over whether or not stealing music is moral. With the recent closing of LimeWire, Fairfield students find themselves struggling to download the latest Rihanna tune because they simply don’t want to pay for an overpriced song.
As Allie Flannery ’14 says, “It makes me angry at how much music costs these days. Songs are now two dollars on iTunes and I just find myself missing the days where songs were 99 cents.” This is the greatest reason why websites such as LimeWire and Dirpy were so popular before being closed down by the Federal Court.
It is understandable that artists deserve money for the music that they produce. But, how far is too far?
Expecting people to pay an excessive amount for a single song is just plain ridiculous. In my iTunes library, I have close to 3,000 songs. If I had purchased every one of those songs, I would have spent just about $6,000. For songs that people really only listen to a few times before something new is released, this is a waste of money.
If you can listen to music over the radio for free, why not make it free everywhere else? There is no real difference between listening to Eminem in a club and in your own dorm room. Music was created for people to enjoy, and now a heavy price tag has been placed on it.
On the Fairfield campus, LimeWire was actually blocked prior to the court shutting down the website. It was thought that this would prevent students from stealing music. But most students would just write down a list of songs that they wanted and waited until they went home to download for free. In the meantime, listening to music on YouTube is an acceptable substitute.
While Dirpy, the website that converted Youtube videos to MP3 files, was not technically illegal itself, it created a gray area between legal and illegal activity. This website was highly used among Fairfield students because of the simplicity in copying and pasting a URL.
The conversion of copyrighted material to a person’s iTunes raises a large issue and is seen as illegal. If a person is able to listen to Youtube videos for free, however, why is it illegal to hear these videos through iTunes? It is an identical audio that has been pinpointed as being illegal. As a result, Dirpy was also retired due to illegal downloading of music.
Not only did LimeWire offer free music, it had a wider search range for songs. There are many times when certain songs are not available on iTunes whether they are popular or not.
Through the use of LimeWire, however, virtually every song was available for fast and easy download straight into a person’s iTunes library. Songs that have been leaked to the Internet were present in the LimeWire search. Because downloading music from LimeWire was already illegal, it didn’t make a difference whether or not the music itself was illegally leaked.
As music is not a tangible item, is it really considered stealing? Stealing an album from Target is very different from downloading one song for free. People do not look at music as something they have to pay for because it is placed right on the Internet.
So what do Fairfield students think about the closing of websites such as LimeWire and Dirpy?
Esther Kum ’14 says, “I can’t see the closing of LimeWire really being effective. There will always be another source to illegally download music from.” Kum makes a very good point because it’s true that if students want to download music for free, they will find a way.
So this raises the question: how far will the government go to ban the inevitable, illegal downloading of music?
Leave a Reply