Piracy

Essay by k6y87High School, 11th grade April 2005

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Piracy is Courtney Love's main point of discussion when speaking to the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference in 2000. Love's purpose is to inform the audience about what she believes piracy to be and how artists are affected.

Love is clearly well-informed and she uses many statistics, such as how Toni Braxton received 35c from each album sale thanks to a "terrible recording contract", demonstrating that her speech is well-researched. Love is honest with her audience, which builds her credibility, and offers her own opinion as she talks about facts. She uses offensive language at times which makes her appear very passionate about what she is speaking about.

Listing is another feature Love uses in her speech, such as facts, people and even lists of things we think about but don't say or act upon.

She names and labels people so the audience knows exactly what she is talking about and who she is referring to, like Lars Ulrich, Napster, and Edgar Broufman the CEO of Seagram.

Love starts off by introducing piracy and defining it. She immediately states that she is not referring to Napster-type software, but major recording label contracts.

She uses an anecdote, a fictional story, to demonstrate the difference between how much money a rock band appears to be paid and how much actually goes into their pocket. Love clearly believes that music is special and personal and that record companies are exploiting this idea since artists are now working for them to make them money. Again, she talks about how it is piracy when the Act was amended and emphasizes how unjust it is, using a real-life example of TLC. TLC received less that 2% of the $175 million earned by their CD sales. Using the analogy, "The annual sales of cassettes, CDs and...