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Increase of Internet Piracy and Hacking Essay example

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The area of Atlanta contains millions of people, and each person owns personal electronic devices. Common electronic devices may include: laptops, phones, music players, etc. Every household contains at least one of each device. From the IFPI in a BBC article, ninety-five percent of music is downloaded online illegally (“Legal Downloads Swamped”). The population of Atlanta’s area is almost 5.5 million in 2009(“About Atlanta”). Based on the statistics given, it is calculated that 5,225,000 music files for a particular song would have been downloaded from the internet in this city alone, and each file for a song costs almost a dollar. That is more than five million dollars lost for a single song in Atlanta. The example only shows only a …show more content…

The Witcher 2, a video game, was downloaded 4.5 million times (Peckham), and the developers of the game say that for every one copy of the game sold, four copies are pirated. Each game costs sixty dollars, so 270 million dollars are essentially lost. From the article of Peckham, Iwinski, CEO of the developers of Witcher 2, stated, "The reality is probably way worse." (Peckham). From this quote, the loss can be estimated that several more million dollars were lost. The article states that only a million copies were sold (Peckham). The amount of downloads is drastically larger compared to the amount of people who actually purchased the game. The future of the companies will have trouble making any new installments to the series due to the fact that they are not able to use the finance from the previous game to support the third one. Furthermore, the music and movie industries are being punched in their guts from the illegal downloading. From the introduction, a song loses five million dollars from Atlanta for just that particular song. There are hundreds of thousands of different digital products that are illegally downloaded from a city alone. Not only different products at a given time, it can be assumed that people download multiple digital products over repeating intervals throughout the years. From the different factors of piracy, the digital industries are losing billions of dollars each

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