Pirated Movies: A Blessing in Disguise The problem won’t go away. In fact, it’s getting worse. “Piracy is devastating to our business!” said Arianne Fraser, CEO of the Highland Film Group. Although she is an independent filmmaker who struggles to finance her projects, major Hollywood studios with plenty of money agree with her. They contend that piracy is theft and must be stopped. Anti-piracy laws have failed, though, so what can filmmakers do? Maybe they need a new point of view. Pirated movies may be illegal, but their existence has economic and social benefits for the public as well as for the movies’ creators. Filmmakers are not convinced by this argument, explaining that the loss of revenue from piracy doesn’t just affect the bottom line. According to Gareth Neame, executive producer of “Downton Abbey,” piracy reduces the value of original works. That, in turn, prevents good films from being made at all, unless they are potential blockbusters whose box office revenues can sustain the alleged losses generated by piracy. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) claims its industry loses $250 billion per year to piracy, along with 750,000 American jobs. Studies show, however, that consumers don’t care. A survey conducted by Irdeto, a provider of digital security technologies, confirmed that most people know piracy is illegal. Only 19%, however, said they would stop watching pirated content because of the supposed financial losses caused by
Piracy has become a major issue in the United States. For every motion picture that has been featured in theaters also has been pirated onto the Internet the next day, and for every new musical album that is released, yet there is a free torrent file of the album within the same hour. Even though these online pirates steal music and movies from other companies and make a drastic profit, yet these “rogue” websites receive 53 billions visits a year from across the globe according to Creative America. The persistence of the thieves that break copyright laws of the productions has lead the entertainment business to place a definitive complaint to the U.S. government of the constant notion of piracy. While the notion of piracy was not left
Piracy has always been an issue for intellectual property owners. Piracy existed even as early as the 1500’s. In one famous instance, Renaissance artist Marcantonio Raimondi copied some of Albrecht Dürer’s works and claimed it was his own (Gambino, 2011). Politicians and content creators try to combat piracy with laws and lawsuits, but people engaging in piracy remain active and elusive. However, the development of the Internet has exacerbated this issue. Technological advancements, specifically the advancements in file sharing, have made the exchange of information extremely inexpensive, quick, and easy. People have direct access to unauthorized copies of millions of movies and songs due to programs such as Napster and Limewire. Thus, illegal
In the global market that we leave in companies are trying to find any and everyway that they can to get ahead in their respective markets. This most of the time brings out the most innovate thinkers that can come up with a way to keep it’s company on top of their market and sometimes we see that there are companies that like to take a short cut by using non legal and malicious methods. According to Lewis, (1985), Software piracy is the illicit copying of the operating instructions and applications programs, which make computers work, is a large and growing industry. The Pirate Bay is part of a European social and political movement that opposes copyrighted content and demands that music, videos, TV shows, and other digital content be free and unrestricted. In the words of the Pirate Party, “the Pirate Bay is a unique platform for distributing culture between regular people and independent artists, and that’s something we want to preserve.”
Criminals guilty of piracy may be sentenced up to 5 years in prison and fined up to 250,000 dollars. Crimes such as piracy are very serious, as well as the punishments. Businesses who promote and commit piracy and other similar need to be prosecuted, and organizations should do everything they can to win legal battles. Because businesses who steal media promote piracy and creators of the media are losing potential money, it is appropriate for organizations such as the Motion Picture Association of America to use charged language like "piracy" to win legal battles.
The issue with piracy is how hard it is to control and regulate. New release movies should be released in all formats, DVD, online, mp4, Blu-ray, etc. The Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Bill 2015
After reading “Dear Piracy Apologist: Downloading unreleased films is not cool”, the author expresses that he does not torrent films with the reasoning of, ‘because I can does not mean that I should.’ He states opposing arguments with bias for anti-piracy and defends reasons not to pirate.
Illegal Piracy has been a problem for many musical artist. The law is not really enforced on piracy. Many people get away with it and very few get prosecuted with a fine . Musicians spend time to make music for people and to make money for their own reasons, like for food or clothes. Movie makers are also victims of Illegal Piracy, along with many others, piracy to them should be
The Global music industry makes around $43.9 billion dollars a year. $12.5 billion of that is lost each year due to Piracy in the music industry and 70% of online users find nothing wrong with online piracy (“Music’s Last Decade: Sales Cut in Half”). Is it wrong? Is music piracy stealing? This topic is said to have inspired Charles W. Moore to illustrate these points in his essay. Charles W. Moore writes the essay “Is Music Piracy Stealing?” and tries to answer his own question. Moore starts off by explaining that current day pirates simply do not care about copyright laws. He goes into detail about the philosophy, ethics, and morality of the threat to the free exchange of music over the Internet. Moore says, “Digital copywriting is as serious and criminal as stealing a CD from a record shop or a DVD from a video shop” (242). The subject on piracy is a controversial and an argumentative subject. Although Moore gives many great examples throughout his essay, he also has some faulty reasoning such as the root question of his argument is not provable, his factual data is excessive, he has lousy introduction and closing paragraphs, and his views are biased.
According to Fritz Attaway, one of MPAA’s top executives who works to develop the movie industry’s anti-piracy policies, “We have no illusions that we will be 100 percent successful. Piracy has always been and will always be with us.” Continuing he talks about what their alternative goal is, “Our goal is to keep it under a reasonable level of control where we can make enough revenue in a legitimate market to recoup expenses and continue to make new movies” (Van der Sar, 2010). There is no way to eliminate every pirate in the world and so Attaway’s proposal is the only remaining thing to
We also need to cut down on piracy so that Hollywood studios have more of a reason to produce original films. That means being cautious on how we educate about piracy with a younger demographic since a lot of teenagers and young adults today don’t see illegal piracy in quite as black-and-white terms as people use to. Instead of lecturing about the legality of piracy, content creators should instead try to focus on forming a genuine, connected relationship with their audience. They should also choose to share some of their work with the public free of charge. Creators who have done this in the past have received plenty of financial support from the communities that they built. As I mentioned before, piracy is unlikely to go away altogether but in order for it to be reduced, filmmakers who are opposed to piracy and people who engage in it need to find common ground and this can be done by the creators understanding their audience’s
Piracy is similar to plagiarism in the sense that a creation is being replicated without permission or compensation. Much like a business copyrights a sandwich making process or the manufacturing of a vehicle; an author’s creation is their own unique undertaking. A creator of content has little motivation to create if anyone can just come across and replicate their hard work and achieve the same recognition or financial rewards. Thus by pirating content, one will likely limit future projects that the creators produce.
Moreover, with these streaming services being so successful, studies have shown that piracy has dropped by 29% in 2015 for the Australian film industry (). Hastings sees Netflix as a solution to piracy by saying:
We all know that downloading pirated music and films is illegal, but what exactly is it? The term piracy refers to the copying and selling of music, films and other media illegally; in other words you are copying and selling copyrighted media without the permission of the original owner (NiDirect, n.d.). With the massive growth of the internet and its ability to store and capture vast amounts of data, we have become much more reliable on information systems in all aspects of life, but it does not come without the risk of information technology being used unethically. With the number of IT breakthroughs in recent years “the importance of ethics and human values has been underemphasised” often resulting in various consequences. Not surprisingly one of the many public concerns about the ethical use of IT is that “millions of people have downloaded music and movies at no charge and in apparent violation of copyright laws at tremendous expense to the owners of those copyrights” (Reynolds, Ethics in Information Technology, 2015). This essay covers the ethical issues of downloading pirated music and films and the impact it has on music corporations and recording and film companies.
Julian Sanchez, research fellow at the Cato Institute, provides an interesting outlook on the issue of piracy, and what should be done. He compares the actions taken in the movie and television industry to prevent piracy by stating:
When I speak about piracy, I mean the act of copying and sharing data online videos, software, music etc. Torrent downloads are becoming threat to media production companies because companies put a lot of time and effort to release a good song or a music video and for a website to buy one for few dollars and just sharing it for people across the world who did not pay for it makes the company lose few millions. On the