Some of you might remember when Napster was huge and hard drives were being filled up with large amounts of music. Thanks to copyright laws, people ranging from small children to elderly grandmothers were being hit with lawsuits from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). They were demanding large sums of money for each file that was downloaded. Napster, in turn, shut down, and the rest is history. Or so we thought.
Later on, Napster clones rose up, and peer-to-peer networking became the “underground” way to acquire things for free that you would otherwise have to pay a price to own. Other types of files were joining mp3s in their hard drives. People were now toting around pirated copies of operating systems, various programs (especially anti-virus programs), both console and PC games, and regular and HD movies. Hard drives were filling up to the brim again. Couple that with more hard drive storage than ever, and from that arose two highly unpopular bills—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), which were designed to stop online piracy, but concerns about invasion of privacy and massive protests as a result of that halted both efforts.
However, the war on online piracy rages on. MegaUpload, a file hosting service, was shut down earlier this year as a result of online piracy. The Pirate Bay is a frequent target of those attempting to stop online piracy and has been blocked in several countries at one point, including the People’s Republic of China, the United States, and several countries in Europe, but a nine-year old girl in Finland ended up being the victim of a police raid on her home for downloading an album from a local pop artist, Chisu, from The Pirate Bay. The police took away her laptop and told her father, “It would have been easier for all concerned if you had paid the compensation.”
“I got the feeling that there had been people from the Mafia demanding money at the door,” the girl’s father explained. “At that point my jaw hit the floor and I wasn’t sure if I was awake or dreaming. So the investigator suggested, between the lines, that I empty my wallet and keep my family in hunger for the next two weeks so that they could get rid of the case? What the (expletive)…is this how it goes? I could evade justice murder by skipping Christmas this year?”
“We have not done anything wrong with my daughter. If adults do not always know how to use a computer and the web, how can you assume that children or the elderly—or a 9-year-old girl—knows what they are doing at any given time online?” the girl’s father added. This is a reference to the Napster raids in the United States around a decade ago, where small children and elderly grandmothers were often the targets of the RIAA’s lawsuits.
“This is the pinnacle of absurdity. I can see artists are in a position, but this requires education and information, not resource-consuming lawsuits,” he concluded.
The artist in question, Chisu, said that she didn’t want to sue anybody and that no artist needs this kind of media attention. “I hope that the matter will be resolved soon and sorry to my 9-year-old girls,” Chisu wrote, pointing them to this free link to her music on Spotify.
