Internet Harms

zhaodong ma. Nicholas Jaramillo. Xinyu Zhou, Zhi Liang, Mariana Isidoro,Mac Khan.

      In FREE CULTURE, Lawrence Lessig describes this chapter Harms in three main

parts: Constraining Creators, Constraining Innovators and Corrupting Citizens.

In Constraining Creators, he explains how the current law makes the utilization

of recent digital technologies like emailing a music video presumptively illegal.

He conjointly tries to inform people that it's nearly not possible to work out the

road between legal and illegal on the web. For the second part, Lessig gives us an

example on how a music company ends up suing a MP3.com website for giving

out free music. Corrupting Citizens is the most significant part of this chapter, it

describes how the internet harms the citizens and we will be mainly talking about

this point.

     

       The internet has slowly corrupted the public by making it easier to illegal gain access to an artists 

work. For example, instead of going to a CD store and buying a CD legally, a person can go to 

websites such as youtubetomp3 to download music for free.  The majority of the public using the 

website to download music do not question if it is legal. The label company thinks the opposite and are 

taking actions to shut down the website. In our research, we noticed that the disciplinary actions in each 

piracy act varied. For example, in a case where a student plagiarizes another persons’ work, they lose 

their writing integrity and may be kicked out of school. On the other hand, the person who created a 

free music download website was sued for millions of dollars. We believe that the discipline isn’t 

constant, and it should be on equal terms. Internet harms should have a constant action of discipline, 

and not let go from a slap on the wrist to being sued for more than what you’re worth.

http://mktsci.journal.informs.org/content/early/2011/10/13/mksc.1110.0668

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_scholarly_publishing/v038/38.1harms.html#bio