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:
Media piracy and copyright issues have been seen as a huge issue in the history of national and international law. These issues have grown to greater concern up to this point in time because of the advancements in technology, the ease of stealing information, and the accepting culture of copying, sharing and redistributing copyright material. It has become a part of our daily lives like downloading music from YouTube through third-party sites, pirating movies from online websites through torrents and torrent applications, or copying scripts off the internet for school productions. Since the beginning of the rise in copyright and piracy issues, research has shown that Canada and the United States have taken some similar and some different approaches these issues.
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
The Internet has transformed the music industry. Sales of CDs in retail music stores have been steadily declining while sales of songs downloaded through the Internet iPods and other portable music players are skyrocketing. Moreover, the music industry is still contending with millions of people illegally downloading songs for free. Will the television industry have a similar fate?
Copyright laws must be flexible in addressing and supplementing the needs of Australia’s modern society. However, the failure of the existing, and outdated Copyright Act 1968 (Cwth) in fulfilling the needs of the Australian public has triggered the need for copyright reform. Copyright reform aims to reconsider the relationship between copyright, innovation, technology, research, and economic growth, where it would provide flexible laws fundamental to the broad dissemination of knowledge. Copyright laws should strike a balance between the interests of the creator and the Australian public in terms of access to knowledge, culture and education. Copyright reform aims to
It is important to note the following when evaluating China’s media industry: Public service television is an essential service to the community and cohesion of democratic societies aimed at the production, publication and distribution of a set of radio and television channels airing the diverse and balanced for all audiences, covering all genres and designed to meet information needs, culture, education and entertainment of Chinese society, spread their identify and cultural diversity, promote the information society, promoting pluralism, participation and other constitutional values, ensuring access for significant social and political groups.
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
From the moment consumers were able to use the internet to get music, software, and movies, piracy has had serious financial implications for the motion picture industry. Copyright protection presents some difficulty in illegally obtaining movies, but there are many avenues around most of these systems. The RIAA, or Recording Industry Association of America, has tried several legal ploys to prevent people from accessing this material, but many consumers continue to access it with little concern. Much like the music industry, which was challenged to reinvent its distribution model, the movie industry has to do the same thing. To counter the amount of piracy the movie studios must develop new systems for content delivery including streaming new release movies at home.
Corporations that move into China have long recognized that internet censorship is a fact of life. In 2006,
It is interesting to note that some of the new Internet regulations contradict International Laws signed by the Chinese government. China signed the
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:
The impacts on the Film and Television industry by discussing the positive and negative socio-economic effects of streaming services and pay-tv on sectors such as retail, exhibition and free-to-air television.
Today, digital technology and the Internet are deeply reshaping the motion picture industry with a trend toward the digitalisation and disintermediation (Zhu, 2010). Media streaming services are an example of this current restructuration. Providing an access to a wide collection of entertainment online at a cheap price, they have penetrated the monopoly that cinema once enjoyed (Herberg, 2017). A significant example can be found in the US company ‘Netflix’, source of nearly a third of all North American downstream internet traffic at peak hours (Hallinan & Striphas, 2016). Once a small DVD subscription service created in 1997, it offers today to its subscribers to watch its own produced movies and shows as well as content of other
An impressive push to extend intellectual property by the entertainment industry may result in the development of new technologies and revolution in the way people watch TV, access information at home, experience interactive TV. But at what cost?
The depth of China’s involvement in intellectual property theft is far greater than I would have ever expected. Prior to taking the business law course, I never thought about what intellectual property theft was or the impacts that it has. The report of the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property, states that “China is the world’s largest source of Intellectual Property theft” (pg 10 & 11) costing the American economy hundreds of billions of dollars per year, along with millions of jobs.