Global Software Piracy Case Study

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

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.”

Government should regulate computer and technology to some extent like preventing illegal access to computer technology, information, and its application without paying. However, government should prevent someone from entering into somebody personal privacy in online. Also, there should be a law to prevent children to access certain sites because if they are not mature the children can be influenced in a wrong way. The governments need to stop people from using illegal download because when illegal download occur the company of the product lose their money and that hurts a business. Intellectual property needs to be protected because anybody can gain benefit from the hard work someone else, so that would be wrong not to protect intellectual property.

Most of the software that is used today is purchased as a one-site license. This means that only one computer can have that software installed on in at a time. Copying or sharing this information without the use of multiple licences is seen as Software Piracy. There are many ways of preventing software piracy. Software piracy does not only affect one individual but also can affect a large group or company. Some of the effects of software piracy are; it reduces the funding for ongoing development efforts, it can limit the amount of jobs opportunities that are available to people, it also allows for other unauthorised copies of software that may contain bugs or viruses and lastly it prevents the user form getting any high quality technical support and product updates. There are too main factors/ways that can help to prevent software piracy. One way is hiding the users IP address therefor any traces of you being seen on that website are lost and therefor you cannot be hacked. You can also download software which will set up firewalls in order to prevent the user form getting hacked or getting a

Piracy is already illegal in the US, and most places around the world, yet it persists underground, but more often in plain sight. Short of passing a law that allows the actual blacklisting of websites like China and Iran, there is no legislative solution. That’s what SOPA and PIPA were attempting to do, but it so obviously trampled on the First Amendment, it was laughed out of existence as the entire internet protested it. The only other thing you could get the internet to agree on was if they tried to institute a ban on cat pictures.(Tassi)

In the various media industries there are extreme worries concerning unauthorized downloading and copying of their products known as piracy. Piracy of items has been part of commerce for centuries; counterfeiting of currency for example. With the information age the ease at which media can be pirated has caused an explosion of this phenomenon. This practice is an illegal act that is done by individuals for personal use and also for profit. The first do not seem to see the issues caused by this practice such as; the spreading of viruses and lower quality products. We will use Reynolds' Seven-Step Ethical Decision Making Approach for the breakdown of the ethical reality of software piracy.

I’m afraid that the issues that had to do with the rights for creators of content (authors of music, books, papers, etc.) to be able to profit from their work without being deprived of their livelihoods due to piracy, was confounded due to the ignorance of law makers about the nature of the Internet (the free flow of ideas, the ability to collaborate with people from all over the world and engage in thoughtful discourse and debate, etc.). Further, the influence of money and pressure being brought upon the government to pass the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) by very wealthy and influential organizations (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organizations_with_official_stances_on_the_SOPA_and_PIPA ) created undue pressure to get Congress to act without thoughtful investigation into the

Businesses who pirate movies and songs need to be prosecuted, because they make people view piracy as morally fine and promote it. In the article "When Stealing Isn't Stealing," by Stuart P. Green,

Because the fact that the Internet has made it so much easier to distribute software, both legally and illegally, it is extremely difficult to “cripple” the software so that it only functions on the computer of the person who purchased it. I feel that people don’t mind paying for software, but the fact that software has gotten so expensive; most people refuse to pay it. Microsoft and Adobe are a great example of software that cost anywhere from $200 - $1000 to purchase. How can the public really afford prices like that? Sure if you are a corporation and utilizing the software to produce something that will bring in money, it is understandable. I

Research and summarize the lost sales and/or profits caused by a particular situation of illegal copying or piracy of software, music, or video. You should provide the dollar amount of lost sales and/or profits over a given time period to a specific industry, country, firm, or individual. You must use an article or other published source for credibility, not just a forum or message board. Note that some controversy exists in this area; for up to 5 extra credit points you may write a paragraph that summarizes why piracy does not result in significant lost sales (again from a credible

The increase is piracy has led to educating people through campaigns, which will mean in future that the piracy should decrease as knowledge increases

Australia has begun to stand in favor of censorship by banning such things. Though Australia's efforts seem noble, they're so fundamentally flawed, it only increases the negative effect on the distribution of this malicious medium. The Electronic Frontier Foundation expounds on how this primarily valid idea is poorly constructed and will further increase the adverse consequences of this time of illicit dissemination: ".. filtering does little to curb the trade of child pornography, much of which is traded across peer to peer networks and VPNs" (EFF, 3). This same concept can be applied to piracy. Piracy is prevalent on the Internet, but by forcing regulations, people will only become more devious, and the effects of this will become more widespread. Furthermore, it can be argued that piracy helps small musicians and film studios gain recognition. David Blackburn, a PhD graduate of Harvard in economics did an extensive study on the projected amount of albums sold by indie artists in correlation to their piracy rate. Blackburn discovered that albums with a higher piracy rate sold more albums than those that didn't (Blackburn 21). Furthermore, artists that were not previously pirated resulted in up to a 10% sales increase when their content started being distributed illicitly (33). There is no

Online piracy is commonly referred to as a threat to businesses in the creative industries. The WTO Agreement on Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (a.k.a. “the TRIPS” agreement) defines piracy as:

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:

Such policy seems to be working with plagiarism at e.g. Universities, but in term of intellectual property the intangible aspect of the product makes it more difficult to control. Therefore stopping online piracy is easier said than done, as it would require enormous human resources from a government to track down illegal websites and taking a legal action against them leading to the closure. One case study worth following regarding this issue was on the major streaming website TV SHACK.net has been seized many times by the US government and it kept changing the domain addresses to overseas addresses as .co or .bz. The owner, 23 year old student Richard O’Dwyer from Sheffield has been charged with copyright infringement and the US Justice Department has been seeking to extradite him from the UK since May 2011 – BBC reports. Streaming itself is a grey area in many countries, i.e. Germany, where it is not perceived as downloading but has been sourced using illegal means. Compared with the legal issues and the fact that the content was stored on foreign servers the law enforcement was extremely difficult, but now it has been set an example worldwide of tackling with piracy. On entering the internet address now a video clip displays which in a humoristic educated people on what piracy is and how much a “free” movie really cost. Such attempt is one of the suggested ways in dealing with piracy through