Articles of the Month

Is It a Cyber Crime?

Napster, Morpheus, and Kazaa. All examples of free MP3 finders that allow users to locate music and download it without cost. All you need is an Internet connection. This software is used my millions of people around the world, mostly in North America.

Now is it a crime to do this? Some may say yes and some may say no. If you are downloading the music, and selling it, you are breaking the copyright law on every song and CD you sell. Now if you are just downloading the songs and listening to them for your own pleasure, are you really doing anything wrong? You are just using other resources around you, like borrowing sugar from a neighbor.

Now each person or user of this software will have their own, individual opinion of the ethic - if it is right or wrong. But what do you think the majority is? If all the users were to take a vote what would the majority be? I tried to do this over the youth.gc.ca web-site but got very little feed back but the majority of the feedback was for the selection ?NO? buy only one vote.

So what does this all mean? Does this mean people are going to stop using Morpheus, Napster, and Kazaa? Of course not, the only way people will stop is if the service is stopped. But eventually another one will be created and we are back at the start. If you feel the way others do, stop into the general discussion room in the Message Board center and vote and give me your feedback. I look forward to hearing from you.