The Most Overlooked Crime: Piracy

Internet piracy is not a victimless crime. Piracy is a term used to describe the illegal downloading of music, movies, games, and even software online. Although many people don’t feel that piracy is a crime that affects anybody, it really does. People pirate stuff online because it is free and does not require one to run to a store to get their product. People that pirate these things don’t think of the repercussions that go along with it. You can have to serve up to 10 years in prison, and pay a fine of $250,000.

Online piracy is a huge problem, one which costs the U.S. economy between $200 and $250 billion per year, and is responsible for the loss of 750,000 American jobs. These numbers seem huge: $250 billion per year loss would be almost $800 for every man, woman, and child in America. And 750,000 jobs – that’s twice the number of those employed in the entire motion picture industry in 2010 (Freakonomics). In 2010, the Government Accountability Office released a report noting that these figures “can be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology,” which in English means these figures are legitimate and that piracy really does hurt our economy.

There are a lot of people who download music and movies without paying. The main reason that this is such a big issue is because piracy substitutes for a legitimate transaction; for example, someone who would have originally bought a DVD of the movie Young Guns but instead downloads it for free on The Pirate Bay. In this case, the person pirating the movie or song would never have bought it. This happens frequently if the “pirate” lives in a relatively poor country, like China, and is simply unable to afford to pay for the films and music he or she downloa...

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... Target and Wal-Mart will sell the same CDs and DVDs to you for double the cost. The reason that stores like Target and Wal-Mart sell their software for so much is because of how many times it is illegally downloaded online. Think about it; if everybody was willing to pay an average cost of $6 for a DVD as opposed to $20, the world would be a much easier place to be for people who legally purchase their forms of entertainment.

Works Cited

Garcia, Cathy R. "Black Eyed Peas Will.i.am Says Piracy Can Be Good Thing." Koreatimes.co.kr. The Korea Times, 8 May 2008. Web. 21 Jan. 2014.

Raustiala, Kal. "How Much Do Music and Movie Piracy Really Hurt the U.S. Economy?" Freakonomics RSS. Freakonomics, 12 Jan. 2012. Web. 21 Jan. 2014.

Woollacott, Emma. "Netflix Checks Piracy Stats To Help It Decide What To Buy." Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 16 Sept. 2013. Web. 23 Jan. 2014.