Topic Proposal: Solutions to illegal music downloads causing profit losses to music industry

Over the past few years, the music industry has faced perhaps its most dangerous threat: illegal, free music downloads. I still remember those days when you would actually walk into a record store to buy the latest CD of your favorite artist. The huge decline of sales that the music and record industries faced when file-sharing programs started to gain popularity and to offer free, almost instantaneous downloads of songs almost caused the bankrupt of millions of stores, labels, and music producers. Government has taken measures by creating new copyright laws and giving fines to users of illegal file-sharing and P2P programs. Moreover, some programs like Apple’s iTunes have tried to establish a legal system of music downloads at relatively reasonable prices. However, the fact that file-sharing softwares and illegal music downloading offer so many advantages to users has made this problem far from being controlled.