Seminar Debate!

We had a debate in our seminar over whether piracy should be legal. I was on the team that answered for pro piracy. We had a few key arguments to support why we thought that piracy should be legal.

Our main point was that even though more people are downloading music/movies illegally, the artists and companies aren't actually losing money. This is because people who are now listening and enjoying their music illegally are then going on to buy merchandise and concert tickets, which is bringing in revenue for the artists.

This chart shows that even though money from the sales of recorded music is falling, the music industry is gaining more money from everything else. The only revenue which has fallen is the records money, everything else; concerts, publishing, merchandise, has risen over the past 15 years. 

Another point we made was that through sharing music and movies, more people are listening to a variety of different artists and watching less mainstream movies that are made with lower budgets. Bands just starting out usually release a free EP at the beginning of their career, and with people sharing more music they are getting a bigger following. This means their revenues from other aspects (as shown in the chart above) are bigger and the bands are making money this way. With movies, despite the decline in physical copies of films, digital sharing is compensating for this. 

A report said '"Despite the Motion Picture Association of America's claim that online piracy is devastating the movie industry, Hollywood achieved record-breaking global box office revenues of $35 billion US in 2012, a 6 percent increase over 2011.' [*]

We presented our points to the opposing team, and then debated why it isn't a negative to the media industry. One of our main points against the team arguing was all of what was said above, and we also pointed out that while they can speak against pirating, the majority of people, especially teenagers, all own at least one pirated album/movie on their laptops.

Unfortunately we lost the debate, but what I learnt from this experience is how to put together points in a situation against over people's opinions, and how to communicate with other people who have different opinions to your own. 

I enjoyed doing the debate, and having an *almost* civil debate against my classmates.