1. PIRACY<br />Let me begin by stating a fact, no one sitting in this room would ever nick somebody’s money or book or something even as small or insignificant as a pen. It is so because everyone present here has high moral standards. Now, let’s change the situation a little. Imagine all the songs present on your cell-phone or i-pod, imagine all the movies present on your laptops. How many of them were paid for or purchased? While you enjoyed those movies and songs, did your conscience or so called morality hesitate even for once?? I guess not. Why?? Because of our approach on the matter! We would consider picking up a 10 rupee pen as theft but when downloading a 200 rupees music cd or 1500 rupee movie disc, we just overlook it. We have great values when dealing with materialistic properties but when it comes to intellectual property we simply forget all those values.<br />Statistics and researches blame the Asia Pacific region especially India and China for the growing levels of piracy. Even though these countries are bringing down their piracy rates, still they are way ahead of others. Report places India as the fourth largest global hub of online film piracy, behind United States, Britain and Canada. To give an example, the movie Kaminey, was downloaded 350, 000 times on Bit Torrent and about 2/3rds of downloaders were from India.<br />It’s not that the government doesn’t do anything in this regard. Laws and regulations have been put up from time to time. But with the rapid enhancement in technologies, implementing these laws keeps getting difficult. The digital pirates keep using new methods to illegally distribute the copyrighted products.<br />What we forget that our using the pirated materials is somewhere costing someone heavily. According to a report published in March, 2009, as much as Rs. 16,000 crore and 80,000 jobs are lost directly due to piracy. Just imagine, in needy times such as today, you watching a pirated movie or listening to pirated song may be somewhere costing someone his job. Can you still use pirated products after knowing all this?<br />There is still another façade of piracy. Microsoft has admitted that piracy of its Windows operating system has helped give it huge market share in China that will boost its revenues when these users quot;
go legit.quot;
Bill Gates said, quot;
It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not.quot;
With reference to china Bill gates stated “As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”<br />Now, I have provided you with all the facts and figures I could on this plunder of intellectual property rights. The rest I leave up to you and your “high moral standards” to decide that what should your approach be on this subject from now on.<br />