You might have noticed that the posts have been a little light-on this week; we’re on a mid-semester break at RMIT so there’s not been much to report with regards to readings, tutes etc. We’re back tomorrow so the blog will return to a normal pace this weekend.
In the meantime, I thought I’d just do a quick post linking to an Age article that caught my eye this morning: Three strikes’ anti-piracy scheme launched in wake of Dallas Buyers Club threat.
The article is all about the hotly-debated issue of recent years that is online piracy. It seems it’s pretty common these days for the internet to be used to transmit and download illegally recorded copyrighted material. Now, at RMIT we’ve had ‘the talk’ about copyright infringement and there’s a lot to understand, but it’s probably pretty obvious that watching Breaking Bad online when you haven’t paid for it is against the law. It’s a big problem, and as both a media student (which really makes me a producer) and a media consumer, I can see both sides of the argument.
On the one hand, by stealing media you are partaking in behaviour that’s significantly reducing the amount of money circulating in the media industry. It may be difficult to feel bad about taking money away from an industry that seems to be incredibly lucrative, but it’s important to remember that there are plenty of average workers in the media industry who could be put out of jobs if the industry has to be decreased. And even when it comes to the big corporations, surely there’s still a moral and ethical right for creators to be able to control the creative work they’ve produced?
But of course, it’s all very well to talk of these things in theory. It’s difficult to remember them when you’ve just heard season five of Game of Thrones is coming out on Foxtel but it won’t be on Australian free-to-air. As a media consumer and a student, I can’t pretend that I haven’t succumbed to illegal downloading when my favourite show hasn’t been on free-to-air and I couldn’t afford the DVD (and I can’t rent it either, now that my local DVD shop has shut down). I like to think that I’ve just about stopped any illegal downloading now that I’ve gotten myself onto Stan, a pay-by-month internet streaming service, but I understand where the urge to download comes from.
However, it may not be so easy for much longer; the article hyperlinked above explains new policies established by telcos companies that may allow users to be prosecuted for illegal downloading. It’s a little difficult for me to explain succinctly (and I’m not sure I entirely understand it for that matter), but it once again provokes the interesting discussion surrounding the morality of downloading and the effect it’s having on the media industry.