Battling Digital Piracy

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In today’s age where Internet can provide fast access to any kind of information and media, copyrighted content faces grave threat of infringement. The distribution and unauthorized copying of such copyrighted content results in digital piracy. Common examples are downloading and uploading movies, music, e-books, software, and other copyrighted content online. Piracy deprives the original creators, scientists and artists of the deserved incentives. Digital Piracy has caused the US Copyright Industry a loss of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs. To protect the copyright owners’ exclusive rights and encourage original ideas for scientific progress, digital piracy needs to be curbed with appropriate measures. Thus, this paper will discuss the problems caused by digital piracy and suggest measures to reduce digital piracy.

With the growing popularity of the Internet, worldwide distribution of content can be done easily at lower price easily avoiding middlemen for distribution purposes. The disadvantage of such easy access is that consumers can access content that they may not be authorized to view for free. Downloading of digital pirated data being just a click away, many internet users are resorting to illegal sites or the peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. The extent of this problem is so much so that 25% of traffic on the Internet today is one resulting from copyright infringement.

The progress in digital technology has enabled the production of countless replicas inexpensively and their distribution on Internet without any hassles. Content produced without copy-protection measures, the availability of high-speed internet and cheap storage means available online; all contribute to the rising incidence of piracy. ...

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...gal means.

Internet was meant to be open in nature, to provide information and services to everyone but was never meant to be a gigantic piracy machine. It was not designed to facilitate access to copyrighted content and encourage sharing of protected content. There is an urgent need to do away with Internet services that encourage digital piracy. Internet Enterprises, Government and consumers should together work towards maintaining integrity of Internet and take active measures to obliterate digital piracy. FCC plays an important role by implementing policy and technical controls to achieve this.

Works Cited

http://www.judiciary.senate.gov/resources/documents/upload/021611Leahy-RecordSubmissions-Website.pdf

http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/csep590a/06au/projects/digital-piracy.pdf

http://www.itif.org/files/2009-digital-piracy.pdf

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