Recognizing Illegal Websites

As the internet becomes more accessible to people around the world, the opportunities for networking become greater. Users share scholarly articles and YouTube videos with one another instantly. It is no longer necessary to physically "show" a friend a video. All that is needed is to email them or post a link on their Facebook or MySpace page. In addition to sharing, users can download content and store it on their personal hard drive, allowing them to watch it anytime and as many times as they want. Some of the content is expensive so naturally the advanced technology has created some loop-holes that allow some people to obtain this content for free. Illegal music downloading sites and movie viewing sites are appearing to eliminate the sales of DVDs and CDs. Lawrence Lessig notes in his book Remix that "Most in the industry— at least circa 2002— believed that 'piracy' was unavoidable given the 'nature' of digital technologies. Most thus believed the industry faced a choice: drive digital to the periphery and save the industry, or allow it to become mainstream, and watch the industry fail" (40). While Lessig states that Steve Jobs' innovations have saved the industry, these illegal musical downloading websites still receive millions of users a day.

While the ruling on whether or not some of these music websites are legal or not is extremely fuzzy and grey, they are becoming a widely acknowledged tool in the marketing industry. There are a lot of advertisements on these websites because, obviously, so many people access the site everyday. Advertising on these websites definitely comes with risks. According to this recent article, big companies Samsung and Coca-Cola removed their advertisements from a popular music piracy website based in Vietnam. This website, called Zing, has had many multinational companies advertise on their website. The article analyzes the situation by stating that these big corporations' advertisements have added legitimacy to the website and this has upset the artists who feel money is being taken away from them. After Coca-Cola and Samsung were notified of this sentiment, they removed their ads stating they want to respect and support the artists.

While their publicly released statements sound nice, this is obviously a move by these companies to save their reputation. Even though there are millions of users on this website, big companies probably do not want to be associated with websites like Zing. Even though this may be a business savvy move, Lessig's observation about the industry's opinion in 2002 that this may have to just be an accepted way of technology (music sharing) comes full circle. For big businesses like Coca-Cola and Samsung, they are already very established and have enough exposure as it is. For smaller companies looking to thrive in this economy, advertisements on websites like Zing may be the right way to go. The exposure is great and it is showing an acknowledgement that no matter what the laws may be, this technology is becoming the new norm. Lawsuits seem to be either pending or in the process in all of these matters and it is difficult to know what exactly is illegal. The safest thing is to buy CDs or use iTunes. However, as Lessig notes, the culture is always changing and transforming and these new sharing opportunities significantly increase the ways users can obtain many forms of content.