A Destructive Cycle, Teri Rogers, 2001

Teri Rogers

Self expression seems to be what the world is fighting for. The right for people to be themselves and have other people accept them for who they are deep inside. There are thousands of different ways to express oneself, but the most common, or most recognized method, is through the world of music. Music is an emotional outlet and any person with some sort of talent can be considered a musician, whether it's through instrumentation or vocals. One can express what one's entire world is like, or what one is feeling at any given moment. So it is natural that a musician would want to have full control over his/her feelings and life experiences, right?

40 years ago, the music industry was in full force with influential bands such as The Doors and The Beatles, and everything was right with the world. Personal belongings were sacred, and lyrics or guitar riffs were considered part of a person’s belongings. An original song was exclusive to the band or the author--that was no argument. So what huge event has happened in the last 40 years to influence the entire population to have a change of thought on what is right and wrong?

The world of music definitely seems to be heading into a dystopia in the sense that the industry doesn’t seem to be based around the music, or rather the love of music anymore, but much more largely based on how much money an artist can earn from their original work. Also, the world as a whole seems only to care about how much they can aquire for free, and how they can scam the music industry with all the new musical devices coming onto the market each and every day.

Is the culprit the ever-growing sense of greed? For the artists, it seems to be the growing legions of fans, or the ever-changing trends of the entire "tween" population. For the consumer, it was the introduction of MP3 players, and CDR-W. If copying music files for free is so unethical and even sometimes illegal, why does the government even allow these products on the market? Why not ban these copying devices all together, and simply solve one huge chunk of the problem?

The entire Napster trial controversy is a highly-publicized attempt to put an end to sharing copyrighted music. Napster is an online file transfer program available to every online identity in the entire world. Seemingly harmless and innocent at first, the application was praised by every online body who downloaded and tried it! "Its Great!" or "I can get my favorite songs for free!" However, the music industry had enough of hearing those phrases, and the rock band Metallica sued Napster for copyright infringement. That initial lawsuit sparked a chain of different trials, all spewed from the music industry for different infringement claims.

If anyone should be put on trial for infringement, it should not be Shaun Fanning, creator of Napster, but it should be the millions of users worldwide who are the active ones in the program. The user puts the song in his or her C:/ directory, and suddenly its available to millions of users who have no care in the world about which song is copyrighted and which is not. There is no second thought to the legality of it all. They simply don’t care.

Not caring about the legality of something is a huge issue to deal with. It seems as if more and more people every day simply give up hope and stop caring about what is right and wrong in the world. In the Christian religion, it states that on the first day, God created the earth and on the eighth day God created man. It also states that God was put on the cross to die for the world’s sins, but that does not give a person the right to simply forget about sinning, and wronging the world. That does not mean that simply because God died for the sake of the world, that all is rightfully and immediately forgiven if you do wrong.

It seems as if the world, or rather the people in it are stuck in nothing but a destructive cycle of greed. If the cycle isn’t stopped soon and these people made to realize their wrongs, the world may not have another chance to stop its downward spiral into a hateful, crime-infested world. If people can’t wake up out of this frenzied state, imagine what our earth will look like in the year 2010. Just imagine.