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Music File Sharing and Should It Be Legal

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Music File Sharing and Should It Be Legal
Ryan Steele
Jennifer Botich
Information Literacy
May 26th, 2011

Should Music-Sharing Programs be outlawed in the United States?

Research Question:
Should music-sharing programs be outlawed in the United States? The reason I chose to research the topic dealing with illegal music-sharing and the websites that facilitates this was because I think that we are ALL guilty of this at one time or another in our lives. How far do we need to go in order to police files sharing online, specifically music files? I hope to be able formulate an answer to these questions in my research. I personally wanted to look into this query because as a musician I find myself hearing more and more free music on the internet every day. I started to wonder if as artists we are starting to slowly let our guard down and relinquish our music to the people that want to hear it without legal repercussions. Music file sharing seems like it has become the norm amongst any avid internet user, I will also take a look at what programs are preferred and what others are doing to fight the people sharing the music.

Boolean Operators: The Boolean Operators that I used originally was AND as well as + in between the two words “music” and “sharing”. After using the above Boolean operators I had enough search results populate that I was able to print out the resources and use them towards my research. If there were not as many results as there were, I would have put the entire search in quotation marks.

Annotated Bibliography:
“Illegal File Sharing Threatens the Future of the Music Industry.” What Is the Future of the Music Industry? Ed. Roman Espejo. Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2009. At Issue. Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Gale. Web. 12 May 2011.
This source was essential in my paper by providing me with insight into what the actual spirit and letter of the law contains. Through reading this article I was able to briefly explain what the penalty is and what level crime piracy holds.

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