"Piracy"

How illegal is file sharing? Until I read “Piracy” by Lawrence Lessig. I, myself, didn’t understand how illegal it is! I was stunned at the statistics that Lessig presented to me about how much file sharing is going on in the world. He stated that there are 43 million citizens that use sharing networks. (Unfortunately, this number is not surprising, since we are living in a culture, that everybody wants everything at the moment. File sharing makes it easy, because it available to them on the computer.)

When I was in high school, I had Lime wire on my computer; I shared about 20 or 30 songs on there. After reading this article, it made me realize that those 20 or 30 songs that I shared, that I actually made the people that recorded these songs, lose probably a couple hundred dollars. Now I don’t use Lime wire, instead I purchase my songs off of iTunes for 99 cents a song. Since I have been using iTunes compared to Lime wire, I feel much better, because I like to pay for my stuff! I as a person, wouldn't want someone to take something of mine, without paying for it. So why should I rip them off, by taking a song from them. Especially, after they have put some time in effort in doing what they are doing. Isn't it common courtesy to pay for it.