Should the Government Enforce Strict Penalties for Illegal Downloading

741 Words3 Pages
The concept of illegal downloading and the various perspectives of the issue have created a lot of controversy. Copyright is an issue that is continuously growing and expanding as the internet is developing. Whether or not we control this epidemic is up to the government and whether they want to spend their time and money to catch the “criminals” that commit these “dreadful” acts. The perspective of citizen one presented in the source is explaining that the government should be protecting the individual’s rights to their own personal and private property. She is stating that someone who illegally downloads media should face the same punishments as those who steal physical property. The ideology the lady is expressing is very individualistic. In the eyes of the producers of the product (a song or movie), the act of illegally downloading may be perceived the same as walking into a store and stealing a movie or cd. However, many illegal downloaders do not mean any harm by their actions, who’s to say they will download a movie, put their name on it, modify it, and market it as their own? Although someone could do this to another person’s property, we should still have faith in humanity that we only want to enjoy a free movie or song. Our appreciation for the product doesn’t lessen just because we got it for free. Preventing illegal downloading and copyright would result in no media entertainment on sites like YouTube or Pandora. These sites are allowing media to be enjoyed in a free manner; if we abolished this ability the public would be distraught. It is also a long and complicated process to take someone to court for breaking a copyright law; many cases would and have been brushed off. Canada has the highest illegal downloading rate according to population in the world; the government does not and will not be able to hold all the people who do this accountable for
Open Document