Essay on International Copyright vs. Online Piracy

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

For the past decade, if you wanted to download copyrighted material and didn 't want to pay for it, it 's likely you turned to “The Pirate Bay”. Up until a police raid it was the most popular place to grab Sunday 's episode of “MSNBC or Power” months before the Blu-ray hits stores (Seppala, 2014). You didn 't have to log in to some arcane message board or know someone to get an invite. The anonymous file-sharing site was open to everybody and made piracy as simple as a Google search. That 's what scared Hollywood.

The torrent file is a file that contains only data which identifies the components that the digital file has been divided into. This in order to facilitate distribution of this file, an address for one or more trackers is a rule specified in a torrent file. (Stockholm District Court Verdict, 2009). Basic knowledge of P2P and Bit-Torrent is needed to understand the direct work of The Pirate Bay’s platform.

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

Many citizens are unaware that downloading music although free is illegal and others may think of piracy as a victimless. Individual artists, ranging from celebrity musical acts like Metallica to the stay-at-home mothers who sell digital scrapbooking kits in their free time, frequently speak out against piracy when talking to their fans. Grassroots organizations also work to educate the public about music property rights through online marketing campaigns. Technology has given the Music companies a fighting chance in preventing music piracy. Software programs can be created to require authorization codes or online registration forms that make piracy more difficult because they are only given with legal copies. For downloadable content, digital rights management systems limit the number of devices that can play a particular movie or song in order to stop people from sharing unauthorized copies. Unfortunately, there are still resourceful hackers and people in the piracy industry that still continue to find ways to get around these measures. Lawsuits may seem like an obvious way to stop piracy, but legal action is typically a last resort with the widespread use of the Internet, it is way too time consuming and expensive to track down every web site and person that is involved in the production and sharing of illegal music files. Piracy laws also vary from country to country, making enforcement rather

Recording industries to this day are continuously launching lawsuits file sharing software companies, one of their most notable lawsuits being against Napster, a pioneer of file sharing software. Though Napster did settle with the industry and started a subscription fee for all users, internet “pirates” are still managing to find new ways that allow file sharing can continue all over the Internet. Industries attempted to target people emotionally by creating ad campaigns describing file sharing as the equivalent to theft; however, these were only met with mixed success. This was perhaps due to the fact that file sharing also exposed the fact that the artists who create the music see very little profit. With the majority of profits going to the marketing and distribution practices of major record labels, society was left wondering where the real “theft” was

In June of 1999 Shawn Fanning, John Fanning, and Sean Parker created an independent peer-to-peer file sharing website called Napster, Named after John Fanning’s high school nickname. A peer-to-peer (P2P) service allows access to media files like movies, music, books and games by using a certain program that connects to other computers on the same network, meaning that when someone downloaded a file it was coming directly from another person’s computer. The website was specifically designed to transfer MP3 files with a search engine dedicated to retrieving MP3 files only, and a chat service which allowed users to communicate with each other while using this system (Tyson). At its prime, Napster was home to about 80 million users (Gowan).

Copyright laws in regards to music should be repealed. The RIAA has misconstrued the perceived effects staring had on artist development and revenue, when in fact the perceived financial short-comings of downloading and peer-to-peer sharing are actually made up through concert-revenue and merchandise-revenue.

As the success of services like Hulu and Netflix suggests, consumers are only too happy to pay for content that 's made available in a convenient form, and at a reasonable price. If the content industries want a genuinely effective way to reduce global piracy, they should spend less time and money lobbying for new regulations, and focus on providing innovative services that make piracy unattractive. [5]

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

Digital music piracy, or the unlawful downloading of copyrighted music, has been a controversial topic for more than a decade now. The issue was first brought to attention in 1998 when Shawn Fanning created Napster. Though the MP3 file was originally developed in 1987, Napster represented the first mainstream and user-friendly program to transfer and download these files. Napster, a peer-to-peer (P2P) program, allowed online users to connect with one another and swap copyrighted music, videos, and other files contained on their computers, thus providing a way to get free music online. (157)

So I was walking into the store when I heard my song being played. I turned and walked up to the group of kids that were playing it and they instantly recognized me. I asked them if they had purchased the album and they started laughing. Mind you, they really weren’t that old when one shouted out, “We download out music off a website.” When I got home I called my agent and told him about this website and he let me know that he knew about it and it was costing us hundreds of dollars.

Piracy is a hydra. Cutting one of its heads, will make the next head come and bite you harder. The way to “tame the beast” is by embracing and understanding that there are ways to monetize downloading, and arguably give a better chance to the “little guy” to get out there. Also, trends consistently show that file-sharing benefit the bigger, more famous artists, as well. The reason is that file sharing is the more efficient way to distribute content to the masses. This wider base brings out other avenues of revenue, like ticket sales for live shows/movies, extra merchandise being sold and greater exposure in social media. Evidence suggests that file-sharers are actually the bigger spenders on entertainment. So why do they still choose to download content and engage in copyright infringement? The cause can be derived from one or several of the following issues: (i) Pricing - unwillingness or inability to pay the price requested by the legitimate

I believe that it is simply not realistic to speak of eliminating all piracy, as there will always be at least a small segment of the population who can’t be deterred from stealing others’ ideas and creativity. Instead, what we can and should strive for is the reduction of piracy to the lowest levels possible; levels that will not rob authors and copyright owners of the incentive to create and distribute their works. I believe that this could be accomplished through a two-step copyright protection program of: 1) crafting a proper legal framework and 2) the adequate and proper implementation of the said framework. The legal framework provides the basic rights to copyright owners and establishes procedures for the enforcement of those rights. Those procedures must provide the opportunity to obtain adequate remedies when those rights are violated as well as the possibility of punitive monetary judgments and, in appropriate cases, imprisonment of the infringer. The second part of this copyright protection program is the application of these legal rules to ensure that copyright owners have actual, effective protection against infringement of their rights.

Filesharing is the act of sharing files over the internet with another person. This can be done directly between two computers or by two computers connecting to a mediating server. These files can be anything: music, videos, books, blueprints, or other documents, many different types of software and programs including video games. Filesharing is also incredibly easy. Free software like bittorrent makes it simple for anyone to fileshare. With the simplicity of filesharing and the huge amount of information available for download it is easy to see how filesharing can be used illegally. Many files that are available via P2P (peer to peer) networking are copyrighted material. For example a person buys a new CD, puts it on his computer,