Intellectual Property in the Digital Age

In the digital age we live in intellectual property is ever present. As it is so easy to illegally acquire photographs, videos, and music through the internet. As a digital designer you have to be extremely cautious with the pictures you use on cites and to make sure you don’t step on any ones toes when publishing a site. While copyright laws are effective in some ways it is still extremely easy for people acquire what ever the want weather its through bit torrent or sites like lime wire.
Or the notorious Napster, who had its fair share of problems before its demise. I was unaware of Napster’s problems until reading the wikipedia page. I found it quite interesting that so much music was leaked on to the site before it was even supposed to come. I was even more surprised that radio stations used illegally downloaded music as well. While some argue that sites like Napster can be beneficial to a band, I feel quite the opposite. Downloading music for free is like your boss taking money out of your pay check every week because he doesn't feel like waiting to buy that new car he wants. People rationalize downloading music because they may only download one song from a certain artist so how is that really affecting anyone. But when a million people download that song for free it stats to put a whole in the artist pockets. Not only that but it begins to hinder that artist ability to produce more music because they aren’t getting any money from all the work they put into that one song some cheapskate decided to download for free.