Music piracy
Music piracy is the copying and distributing of recordings of a piece of music for which the rights owners (composer, recording artist, or copyright-holding record company) did not give consent. In the contemporary legal environment, it is a form of copyright infringement, which may be either a civil wrong or a crime depending on jurisdiction. The late 20th and early 21st centuries saw much controversy over the ethics of redistributing media content, how much production and distribution companies in the media were losing, and the very scope of what ought to be considered piracy – and cases involving the piracy of music were among the most frequently discussed in the debate.
Quotes about music piracy
edit- Napster affected rock CD sales disproportionately when it first came out in the late ’90s, because rock was what a lot of college students were listening to, and they were early MP3 adopters (and early pirates.) They figured out quickly how to download MP3s for free, so rock sales were the first to decline. It would take a while before piracy/the Internet/MP3s/downloads would cut into other genres, because it took old people a long time to figure out the Internet. [...] Everyone would suffer, but those artists and labels would feel it first and worst. After all the good times, this one-two punch at the turn of the millennium left indie — and rock music in general — reeling.
- Steve Knopper of Rolling Stone, as quoted by Scott Timberg of Vox (Oct 25, 2017) [1]
