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…or catching up on about three months of internet.

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Dialup handshake example

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 A view taken from the side of one of the many lagoons at the New York World's Fair on July 7, 1939. Light brings out some of the wondrous beauty as erected at the "World of Tomorrow". The famous statue of George Washington is silhouetted against the lighted Perisphere. (AP Photo)The 1939 New York World’s Fair

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https://thumbsandammo.blogspot.co.nz/https://thumbsandammo.blogspot.co.nz/

Christ…

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Yaaar…

So a few days ago, an NPR intern wrote this blog entry on being part of a generation ‘raised digitally’ and how as a music lover at the age of 21, she owns over 11,000 songs but can admit to only ever paying for 15 CDs.

This in turn has lead to a shit storm of comments from all sides through forum debates, blog posts and most prominently, this 3,800-word open letter response by academic/musician David Lowrey who argues his perception of a ‘lost morality’ that lies at the heart of internet piracy today. It’s a very eloquent piece that raises some profound notions on how today’s artists are being effected and well recommended worth a read.

Of course, this popular rebuttal had then lead to even more comments, tweets, write ups, re-responses and a interesting introspective post by musician Jonathan Coultan whose music career owes its own foundations to that of the early sharing culture of the internet. The argument over internet piracy is certainly nothing new, but what’s interesting here is that the cases on either side make for a much stronger representation of the ‘who’ that are involved in this issue; as opposed to the usual rhetoric of on is ‘file-sharing pirate’ and the other a ‘monolithic music corporation’.

Whichever sphere of thinking you consider yourself in, this is an issue that’s getting progressively heated with each iteration and… okay, so maybe online reactions to passionated internet writers is hardly a step up from the excessive lengths taken to get a file-sharing website founder arrested; but going from the gross misuse of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to the creation of extremely unreasonable and impractical laws like SOPA and PIPA, social media has greatly simplified our online culture’s process of sharing (which is a good thing), but it appears that simplification has blurred enough of the ethical (not legal) distinction of what’s okay to share and what is really having an adverse effect on the livelyhood of the artists themselves.