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shrug, So what?
Most don't give a hoot for copyright concerns
While internet ethicists bemoan the many special problems that the internet brings along, surfers themselves, more specifically those who traffic in music downloads, are decidedly unburdened.
That could mean that the many threats from the recording industry, which range from taking individual downloaders to court to setting booby traps on downloadable materials, will not stem what has become a rising practice among some 35 million internet users.
A new study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project finds that 67 percent of those who downloaded music from March to May don’t care if the downloads are copyrighted.
That’s up 6 percentage points from the last survey, done in 2000, that found that 61 percent of downloaders didn’t care.
Another 6 percent say they either don’t have an opinion or are so uninformed about the issue that they couldn’t answer.
Just 27 percent do care about the ethical implications, although they did not specify whether they actually felt bad about the actions.
Just after the report was issued, a recording industry threat to take individual file sharers to court did have an immediate impact, with traffic to Kazaa, Morpheus and several other peer-to-peer sites dipping by 15 percent.
But in the three weeks since, as reported Tuesday in Media Life, traffic has surged back to normal levels, suggesting that downloaders either perceived the threats as idle or were abandoning the sites for some other, coincidental purpose, such as going on vacation.
The recording industry blames file sharing for the 25 percent dip in CD sales since 1999, though the link is far from the only thing influencing sales. Music prices have risen in a soft economy, but the industry has become more and more focused on music downloaders as the enemy.
Young people, ages 18-29, care the least about the copyright status of music, with 72 percent saying they were unconcerned. More than half of those in this age group have downloaded music before.
Sixty-one percent of 30-49s say they don’t care whether the music they download is copyrighted.
The study found that 29 percent of American internet users download music, about even with the findings of a 2001 Pew study.
Roughly 4 percent download music on an average day. Twenty-one percent say that they share audio or video files, though just 5 percent claim to have posted audio files online themselves.
Seventeen percent of internet users download music but don’t share files and 62 percent do not do either.
Men are more likely than women (32 percent to 26 percent) to be downloaders. Blacks and Hispanics (37 percent and 35 percent) are more active downloaders than whites (28 percent).
August 1, 2003© 2003 Media Life
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