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Electronic Piracy Essay

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Electronic Piracy

Introduction With the growing popularity of the Internet, there have been many new realms to be discovered. Businesses can now operate with minimal overhead, allowing for dropped prices and increased benefits to customers. People can also now communicate easier and cheaper and in new ways that were never previously thought of. Also, with the coming of the Internet there have been new problems: it’s now easier to lie, cheat, and steal than ever before. Forms of piracy never thought of before are appearing every single day. With the Internet, it is now also easier to copy and share copyrighted materials. One of the inherent problems with attempting to regulate this piracy is the gap in laws between …show more content…

No one has actually gone to court against the RIAA yet, but thousands have settled out of court, paying an average of $3,000 to the RIAA for downloaded music, but some have now chosen to either fight the RIAA in court or to ignore the RIAA, bringing on further possible punishment [3]. Recently though, Verizon has taken a stand against the RIAA and refused to give out the owner of the associated IP address used to share the music illegally [5]. In a court case it was found that Verizon’s point of view on this matter was legal by US law and since, and no Internet Service Providers have chosen to give the RIAA the owner’s name from that point on. Even after this huge attempt to thwart the RIAA’s progress in suing the ones pirating the music, somehow twenty-four individuals’ names have been discovered [3].

Copying DVDs When the Internet first came to the public the downloading of movies was not an issue for the shear lack of bandwidth in order to do so, but as time has progressed, so has the bandwidth in most people’s homes. Lots of people in the US now have high-speed Internet connections, such as DSL or Cable. Such connections to the Internet make it possible to download a full length movie in DVD quality in a matter of hours or less. Also, with the introduction of DVD burners and how they have rapidly decreased in price, most people now have the ability to copy the DVD or download it from the Internet and then burn it to a blank

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