Modern Pirates

      A majority of Americans are guilty of doing this at least once in their lives.  It is illegal but does not physically harm anyone.  If you are still wondering what I could be talking about, I'm referring to music piracy. Consumers have been pirating music since at least when CD's first came out.  Burning a disc for your friend or, later on, letting your friend burn the CD to their computer are examples of pirating music.  Now with new technology it has become even simpler to steal music.  Connecting Ipods, sending songs over the internet, and even downloading them straight from the internet are all modern day examples.  Along with this new technology companies have been trying to keep up with all the hype by coming up with new ideas.  In conjunction with Ipods has been the creation of the Itunes Store.  Through this store consumers can legally purchase music to transfer to an Ipod, CD, or just to have on their computer.  With online technology so prominent, "old fashioned" things such as the CD have been losing numbers in sales while Apple sees an increase.  I believe that with this increase in technology companies thought they would see a decrease in piracy and an increase in legally purchasing music online.  In my opinion I think it opened pandoras box for online pirating websites.  It may be that consumers see $1.29 as expensive compared to stores, when in reality it probably about equals out when purchasing a normal CD in the stores.  Another possibility could be the ease of using the internet and the number of things available to consumers.  If a consumer has the option to get just one song or just one CD for free online, then why the heck would they want to pay $1.29 for just one song?  The government has been trying to find creative ways to make consumers take responsibility for their actions.  For those consumers caught, they have been having to pay a lot of money for their mistakes.  Only time will tell if these actions by the government will be enough to scare consumers into buying music legally.

*I have included a chart that I found from http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009_02_01_archive.html .  Although it is from 2005 it still shows how large of a problem this is among the music industry.