File sharing and copyright

The theme of the movie Good copy, bad copy has in some sense become one of the most discussed topics in Swedish media this year, probably due to the case of the pirate bay in local Swedish court. And copyright is definitely a quite tricky question, especially when a whole young generation gets criminalized.

Don’t misunderstand me, I really do get the problems with film studios not getting paid for invested economic funds, and I do understand why artists need their income. I have been downloading music a lot earlier, a few years ago, but the last say two years, I’ve bought as good as every kind of music from Apple’s iTunes Store. It’s not that expensive, it’s fast and suppose the artist also gets his (or her) share of it. Last but not least, my conscience is clean as a white dove.

The real problems comes when it comes to the film industry. It’s been the same discussion around every new technology, the VHS, the DVD and now streamed media. The industry demands staying at existing types of media, like the ones mentioned above, even though higher bandwidth enables downloading in different forms. Therefor Apples invention of the Apple TV is somehow a good leap in the right direction, where users, for a low cost, can rent or even buy movies. So the problem is likely not the cost itself, but lack of interest from the big companys to reevaluate their own technology and type of media used.

To connect to the lecture that has been given to us this late friday afternoon, the discussions surrounding us with paragraphs connected to the copyright law clearly states the impression that almost any individual can follow these, nor be able to put all these regulations into their own minds. It’s almost necessary to have a special written literature work to avoid being sued when publishing material on the internet, in blogs, social media etcetera.