1. (Mt) – read below
Respond to the following post:Piracy is defined as unauthorized duplication of any type of
content which is copyrighted and is then distributed or sold to everyone else through
various ‘grey’ markets. And now with the advancement on technology as well as Internet,
online piracy has become a real menace in the movie and music industries. Before piracy
went digital or online, there used to exist print piracy where the actual content is pirated in
hardcopy. And soon, several CDs and DVDs had also fallen prey to piracy (Seeley & Wasoff,
2012). There are various forms of Internet Piracy. Some of the more famous forms are
Auction Site Piracy, FTP (File Transfer Protocol) Sites, P2P (Peer-to-Peer), Torrent Sites and
Cracks/Serials Sites (“Internet Piracy”). Ever since the advancement of Internet and its
services, there are more than the above mentioned forms of piracy available for everyone in
the world to use. The Internet plays a grand role in facilitating piracy as it is easily available
to anyone and there are almost limitless sites with almost limitless amount of data in them
for people all over the world to download and share. Auction Site Piracy basically means
when someone tries to sell software or any type of content in an online auction which is
usually a counterfeit or a copy of the original content. Some auction sites such as Amazon
and eBay continuously are on the lookout for fake or copied content that someone tries to
sell on their website. FTP sites are those sites which allow file sharing from one computer to
another. Usually the pirates use FTP sites because large sized files can also be transferred
through them and downloaded. Similarly, P2P sites are those which allow people to transfer
file to each other. Some P2P sites are Napster and LimeWire. Now the torrent sites are
similar to P2P but it is used to transfer large amount of data or content. BitTorrent is
globally popular and used for the transfer and downloading of data. In order to
understand the involvement of young people in piracy, we need to first understand why
does it happen and what makes the young people to use pirated content. The young people
are usually students and work part time jobs for some extra pocket money. In the midst of
all this, when there is an option available to them to get the content for free instead of
having to pay a lot of money, they will undoubtedly download illegal content from the
Internet. Let us take TV shows for example; Netflix did bring in a platform for streaming
various shows in one website or application for a reasonable amount of fee. But as the
audience started to grow, several shows were taken off from the platform to stream in their
own websites. Hence, the result of this being that the audience is now compelled to get a
subscription to several streaming sites to watch their preferred content which is going to
stack up to a considerable amount of fee to be paid (Batt, 2018). The criminalization of
2. copying and piracy will result in the best interests of those companies which produce the
original content be it either in movie or music industries along with TV shows and books.
The producers who invested in them and depended on the income that comes from people
buying their content are the ones who will benefit from the criminalization of piracy.
However, there are also cases of decriminalizing piracy which are prevalent. For instance, in
Britain, they have decided not to prosecute the internet pirates for their sharing of files.
Although piracy is indeed a problem from an economic standpoint, not every instance of
piracy will lead to a financial loss to software or entertainment companies. The pirates who
share files persistently will definitely be subjected to warning letters but there will be no
other further action against these pirates according to The Independent (Aziz,
2014). ReferenceSeeley, M., & Wasoff, L. (2012, March 27). Legal aspects and copyright.
Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/…Internet Piracy .
(0AD). Retrieved from http://www.siia.net/Divisions/IP-Protection-Servic…Batt, S. (2018,
October 16). Internet Piracy Is on the Rise: Here’s Why. Retrieved from
https://www.maketecheasier.com/internet-piracy-is-…Aziz, J. (2014, July 23). Britain has
basically decriminalized internet piracy. The U.S. should, too. Retrieved from
https://theweek.com/articles/445071/britain-basica…
