Computer Ethics

Yesterday we had our second class on ethics because the computers wont work. We were talking about downloading and how it defies ethics and how it is illegal. We started off by talking about the olden days when cassette tapes were there instead of Cd's. At that time you can buy a original cassette tape and listen to it, but whenever you buy a blank cassette tape you will have to pay a extra tax to the record companies because they assumed that people will use the tape to record their songs. Since whenever you listen or copy the tape the quality of the songs will get worse and sooner or later the people will buy their own because it gets worse every time you play it and copy it. When Cd's came out, record companies started to panic because Cd's use light to read the 0's and 1's on the disk and each time it is cop pied the quality stayed the same. People could put these songs on their computer to make a backup with their Cd's in case it breaks. The songs would take up around 10-90 MB of space and some people would share songs and they would get each others modem id and then share files or download it and to download 10-90 MB which is the amount on a CD, will take weeks so not many people did that. Two inversions changed this from happening MP3 and Napster. MP3 was a program that was thought by some university students and it was able to compress songs and take out things you wouldn't really hear so the file is small, it could compress a CD of song from 90 MB to 9 MB. With this people could share and download each others songs in weeks, the record alliance sued MP3 but it didn't work. From the Invention of MP3 came Napter. It is a server that downloads music from computers that has the music that was typed in in the search bar and Napster would download the data and transfer it to the computer searching, because of this the record companies made less money so the Record alliance sewed Napster and the Record alliance won. Since Napster was sewed for this other companies learned from that mistake and instead of being a middle person to transfer the music from one persons computer to their computer to the person searching it's computer, to just downloading strait from each other. With this if more people were downloading the same music, they could share the bits and peaces that some people have that others don't have to download faster. Since the companies physically touch the music they just leaded the person to it so they wont get sued the responsibilities will fall on the person downloading it. In the present day depending on how much music you download in a certain amount of time you can get fined or sued by the record companies but mainly in the US, in Canada there is no such law, but this law is coming close to becoming true. When you buy music you only bought the right to listen or watch the music or music video, the music is not yours so it is illegal to give it to someone else. Lucky for us downloading is not illegal but uploading is. The record company finds out how much you download because they walk up to Internet providers and tell them that to give them the customers IP address so they can track how much people is downloading and when these laws are applied they will watch you closely for around a month to see how much music you download and then they may sue you for amount of money or you could settle for a smaller amount. After talking about downloading and what does it do to the record companies, we started to discuss how could we make downloading more beneficial to companies, we thought up donate the amount you want depending if you like the product or not, so the people making it still can make a profit and if they could make a profit it will benefit you because if they do not make profit they will not produce songs, and since they don't produce songs you wont have anything to listen, so donating what you feel fits is better. This was yesterdays class, talk about download ethics, this is because the computers didn't work.