ARP: Why do people use Winny?

Tomoya Hagiwara
Sylvan Payne
ARW Section AC
October 26th, 2007

Why do people use Winny?

Summary
Kroeber et al. stated that Tylor first defined the word “culture” as a modern meaning in 1871. Tylor said in his book Primitive Culture that “Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” And this definition has been cited a number of times. Therefore it is well-known and famous definition in sociology.

Discussion
It is a common misconception that culture can be substituted for or equaled to custom. However, especially in sociology, culture is used in many more places. One example is morals. Morals are standards of behavior (Oxford Dictionary of English). We sometimes do things not in a legal or illegal way, but in not good way although we know we have to be moral persons. The reason why we sometimes can’t be moral persons is that own ways of thinking have certain reasons. For example, there is a problem that music titles, movie titles, comics, and so on (we call them illegal files) are downloaded illegally for free through web sites or P2P (peer to peer) software application such as Winny, WinMX or Share. It is not clear why people use them and download illegal files. Everybody, including those people above who download illegal files, knows that it is illegal to download such files for free and that we have to obey the law. However, we sometimes stretch the law in our favor selfishly because we have own ways of thinking. Actually, some web pages say that uploading illegal files is illegal but only downloading them is not illegal. Like this, we can download them legally although downloading illegal files is not good from a moral point of view. There is another reason, which is much stronger reason. That is, to be briefly, regular price is very expensive. Although we want to buy regular product, we don’t want to pay lots of money. For example, if we buy an album CD in Japan, we pay about 3,600 yen. In contrast, if in America, we pay about 1,500 yen. Obviously, this is very big difference. If we can get an album CD for about 1,000 yen, we would rather buy it than download it illegally. To sum up, we often justify some stealing. In the problem that illegal files are downloaded, we justified downloading illegal files using with two good reasons, which may just sound good reasons. To solve the problem, sellers have to cooperate with us consumer and to have conferences.

Work Cited
Tylor, Edward B. The Origins of Culture. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958.
A. L, Kroeber, and Clyde Kluckhohn. Culture. New York: A Division of Random House, 1963.
Oxford Dictionary of English. Oxford University Press, 2003