In China, Why Piracy Is Here to stay

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

Unlicensed software use continued to be a major problem in 2013. Indeed, 43 percent of the software installed on PCs around the world was not properly licensed, an uptick from 42 percent in 2011. The commercial value of the unlicensed installations was $62.7 billion. (The Compliance Gap, 2014). As we can see piracy of software and other digital media is a global problem that adversely affects many businesses and the welfare of employees and consumers.

Traditional legal principles and processes are constantly challenged by the need to keep pace with copyright issues in particular piracy. The Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Bill 2015

Darrell Panethiere wrote in “The Persistence Of Piracy” on page 2 that “'Piracy refers to the activity of manufacturing unauthorised copies ('pirate copies') of protected material and dealing with such copies by way of distribution and

The increase in piracy has led to more enforcement of the laws and higher penalties in breaking them

To begin with, pirating has a very rich, and long history that traces back to ancient Greek times. With the progression of trade between empires came the development of piracy. The oldest mention dates back to 1350 B.C. Inscriptions on a clay tablet describe Mediterranean ships being attacked in North Africa. Greek merchants that traded in Phoenician and Anatolian

Piracy is already illegal and punished with heavy fines and possible jail time. Yet piracy still accounts for 23.76% of the total internet bandwidth worldwide.("Safe Internet", 1) This percentage is growing and is costing product creators more and more. Meaning product creators are finding a hard time to make new products when their sales are

Piracy, in music industry, is a huge problem that gets worse instead of getting better. According to The Guardian newspaper, 90% people between 14-25 years old, make music copy. Most of these copies are made in MP3 for personal music collections. The growing average was 300% in the last two year, in comparation to 150% of growing in two years previus. All of this, shows piracy is unstoppable.

Due to the attractiveness of piracy, there has been an overall trend of a drastically increasing amount of pirate attacks and attempts. In the year 2000, worldwide piracy attacks that were reported to the International Maritime Bureau totaled 469 separate incidents, which was an increase of 56% when compared to the previous year’s figures (Rosenberg). This graph by David Rosenberg visually depicts this trend of an exponential increase in piracy reporting from 1978-2000:

The music industry has developed in a series of technological advances, from the development of vinyl to the digitization of music and the creation of formats such as compact disc (CD), digital audiotape, and minidisk (Leyshon 2001). Although the digitized music facilitates consumers, it causes the appearance of piracy and the drop of sales. The subject of piracy has occurred for a certain period. Since 1920's, music piracy has appeared into the world with the production of cassette tapes, voice recorders, and CDs, which brought a new kind of event to court. Moreover, music piracy has become a worldwide issue due to the development of downloading music via the internet.

In recent years, Chinese government has also made great effort in executing these laws[1, 12]. Chinese government launched different anti-piracy campaigns almost every year. During these campaigns, Chinese government raided underground markets, confiscated million copies of pirate software, closed factories of manufacturing counterfeit intellectual products and destroyed hundred product lines. In order to fight against piracy more effectively, China established her first national anti-piracy organization, Anti-Piracy Committee, in October 2002[5]. Besides, Chinese Courts granted favor to many international companies in their case to sue Chinese companies for illegally using their patents, copyrights and other intellectual properties[1, 4, 10]. For example, Microsoft sued two Chinese companies for such abuse and won its case in a Beijing court in February 1999[10].

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:

The current court case and ensuing media battle are accomplishing little in the way of creating real long-term solutions to online piracy (Frankel 1). The only way to get to the core of the issue and really understand the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is to get a little bit of a background on copyright itself.

The rise of the Internet era opened the whole new market for traditional media full of opportunities as well as threats. Online piracy being one of them because the music and film industry loses £5.4bn in a year and if it was reduced by 10% it could have created up to 13 thousand jobs in the UK. There are various attempts taken to fight with online piracy; a case study of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement will be considered as well as other legislations attempting to regulate copyrights in the Internet. This

With today’s ever increasing technology, such as broadband internet, digital piracy is a constant problem. The faster and more efficient the technology, the easier it is to illegally get access to media. Digital piracy is the illegal copying of any digital software without authorization from the sources owners (Zhang, Smith, McDowell, 2009). One of the more common motivations behind committing digital piracy is that many believe it isn’t really a crime, and that information should be shared openly between all individuals. These people consider it a soft crime, meaning that since no violence or harm is involved the crime is harmless (Zhang, Smith, McDowell, 2009). Thus digital piracy has become a daily event for many people and they consider the act to be of no maltreatment (wulandari, 2010). And to these people digital piracy is a mainstay of their daily lives, being as normal of a thing as turning on the television. Digital piracy has three main factors: motivations behind committing the crime, repercussions on society, and repercussions to the individual.