Introduction
The growth of the Internet has led to many new innovations in the way it is used. At first, it was just a form of text-based communication, similar to mail except faster. Then, as connections became quicker, people started to browse web pages, and soon even children could have their own space on the Internet. Today, many people around the world have broadband, which transfers text and pictures much faster than users can read. So developers created programs to use this extra bandwidth, programs that utilized the widespread nature of the Internet.
The first peer-to-peer software can arguably be Napster, which let users download songs from other users. Napster restricted its files to songs since most people still had 56k connections at that time, so larger files would take an unreasonably long time. Presently, broadband connections are relatively inexpensive, so full movies can be downloaded in almost the time it takes to watch them. This widespread availability of high bandwidth has led to new applications, such as Limewire, Kazaa, and Morpheus, which let the user download any type of file, the most controversial of which is movies.
Compared to Napster, these new applications have more decentralized architectures, making the legal battle against them harder to prove. Companies are no longer directing where the users download from – the individual applications are. Users are finding movies from their own computer, and since companies have no personal hand in this search, the film industry now has to target individual users in order to stop them from downloading.
Views On Internet Piracy
Movie Industry’s View
Movie piracy quickly became a problem for the film industry, because the average major studio film costs $55 million to produce and $27 million more to advertise, much higher than other forms of media2. This investment is usually not returned in its initial showing in the movie theatres, so the film is then released to home video. After a year or two have passed, a television channel pays the copyright fee to broadcast it. Also, markets internationally are supposed to go through the same steps. Since the filmmakers get these various forms of copyright fees, many people think that most movies make their money back, but in actuality the Motion Picture Association of America states “four out of ten movies never recoup the original investment2“.
Perhaps the optimal solution for Napster’s dilemma is the possibility of a cable TV type payment. Users pay a certain monthly fee for all the downloaded music they wanted. They could chat with their favorite artists, get first claim on concert tickets, and browse possible downloads by genre. The new system would pay the artists their royalties and sell millions of older titles that at present are sitting in vaults because no stores will give them shelf space. This option has the advantages of cooperation between the music industry and Napster. Napster users will have the same type of service as they do now, with extras so they won’t have to turn to no-fee options (Gnutella and Freenet). Music companies will be able to use the Internet for sales of all their merchandise. If music companies can package a better experience people will pay for it. In a recent survey of college students more than two thirds of the respondents would be willing to pay for a $20 dollar monthly fee of a similar service. The only foreseeable disadvantage of this solution is the plausibility of the record companies cooperating in such an effort.
The entertainment industry and many musicians regarded P2P as a big crisis for copyright, so that they sued the company that produced Napster. “Anger leads Metallica to the Internet,” an article by Karen Schubert in USA TODAY, noticed that heavy-metal band Metallica was suing Napster. And now some people in the music industry are fighting with a distributor of P2P software even in the Supreme Court, and lobbying to outlaw P2P technology. In “File sharing goes to High Court,” USA ...
However, despite the strong copyright policy and punishment of the United States Federal Copyright Act, as enforced by police as well as the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), piracy still rages on, especially...
Shawn Fanning brought the first example of illegal downloading to us in the summer of 1999 (Abbott 2003). Fanning provided the public with downloadable tracks of music using a program known as Napster. At its prime, there were over 80 million registered users downloading from Napster (Lam 2001). Only 6 months after operation, the RIAA (the Recording Industry Association of America) filed a lawsuit against Shawn Fanning and Napster for $100,000 per each downloaded song. The legal problem with Napster was that downloaders were not paying the due royalties to the artist and producers. Napster and its contemporary, Audiogalaxy, were not exact forms of shareware, so the RIAA was able to sue them as companies. The people who were actually doing the downloading got off scotch-free with thousands of free downloaded music tracks. As a result of the case Napster was shut down. Today we are introduced to subsequent forms of downloading, like KaZaA,Bearshare, and limewire would create a whole new kind of trouble f...
It is first beneficial to know the definition of piracy. Piracy has been characterized multiple ways from multiple disciplines. For the purpose of this paper, I will apply the definition of piracy from the 1982 United ...
The story really begins with Napster and its free software that allowed users to swap music across the Internet for free using peer-to-peer networks. While Shawn Fanning was attending Northeastern University in Boston, he wanted an easier method of finding music than by searching IRC or Lycos. John Fanning of Hull, Massachusetts, who is Shawn's uncle, struck an agreement which gave Shawn 30% control of the company, with the rest going to his uncle. Napster began to build an office and executive team in San Mateo, California, in September of 1999. Napster was the first of the massively popular peer-to-peer file sharing systems, although it was not fully peer-to-peer since it used central servers to maintain lists of connected systems and the files they provideddirectories, effectivelywhile actual transactions were conducted directly between machines. Although there were already media which facilitated the sharing of files across the Internet, such as IRC, Hotline, and USENET, Napster specialized exclusively in music in the form of MP3 files and presented a user-friendly interface. The result was a system whose popularity generated an enormous selection of music to download. Napster became the launching pad for the explosive growth of the MP3 format and the proliferation of unlicensed copyrights.
The seminal Napster hit its peak usage with roughly 25 million users in mid-2001. At this exact same time, Bram Cohen produced the BitTorrent protocol and first client. Since then, BitTorrent’s uptake has been exponential. In 2006, an estimated 35% of the world’s aggregate internet bandwidth was reported to have been being used for BitTorrent traffic. More than every third bit travelling across the world was being used specifically in these programs, and this number has only been on an incline since then. Now, even commercial companies like Blizzard (the creators of Starcraft and Warcraft) use BitTorrent to dispense software updates. To say that BitTorrent is the new Napster is massively underestimating its impact. Torrents represent ...
The first online peer to peer file-sharing application was Napster. Napster allowed people to copy music from their CDs onto their computers in mp3 format. They then allowed other members of Napster to download these songs onto their computers. Once this caught on, millions of people were downloading thousands of songs a day. And as you can imagine, this did not make the record companies happy with the idea that people were getting their music for free instead of buying the CD. It also caused a problem with some of the recording artists. Most notably Metallica.
Physical piracy-the copying and illegal sale of hard-copy CDs, videotapes, and DVDs-costs the music industry over $4 billion a year worldwide and the movie industry more than $3.5 billion. These numbers do not factor in the growing (and difficult to measure) problem of Internet piracy, in which music and movies are transferred to digital format and copies are made of the resulting computer file. Journalist Charles C. Mann explains why Internet piracy has the potential to be vastly more damaging to copyright industr...
With the popularity of the Internet, sales for CDs, DVDs, Movies, and many other products have increased. Along with the increase of sales has brought forth an ever increasing problem of illegal media being downloaded. Programs such as Bittorent, Kazaa, and other direct-connect networking programs have allowed the transferring of such illegal media. Downloading song files from the Internet over a free peer to peer network is the moral equivalent of shoplifting music CDs from the local mall.
First, does the industries market actually have an impact from piracy of movies? Supporters of stronger intellectual property enforcement like the men and women who proposed the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act bills in Congress claim that piracy of movies is a large issue in the United States. It is estimated that between $200 and $250 billion per year in losses to the united states economy. They also claimed that this causes a loss of 750,000 jobs in the united states. These estimates are wrong. A estimate of $58 billion, was produced by the Institute for Policy Innovation.Stopping Internet piracy may benefit filmmakers but only some filmmakers, and only some of the time. Scholars debate whether this piracy of movies has an affect everyday. This is one of the problem because it seems that it depends on what movie or how often someone would use an illegal site. A recent updated study by economists students at the Munich School of Management and Copenhagen Business School showed a drawing from nearly five years' worth of data. The students looked at box off...
In today’s technological age and consumer-driven economy, there is no doubt that media piracy and file sharing are in demand and makes a big business. Not only the so called “bootlegged” materials cost less, but most of it also managed to completely imitate the quality of the original materials. It is much easier to people to download movies or music online or buy bootlegged DVDs for 5 dollars than to watch the movie in theaters or pay for the whole CD when there is only one song that the person likes. People know about the possible consequences of these actions, but they do not have a choice especially in these times of economy recession, plus everyone nowadays is doing it, so it would not be considered such a big deal at all if they illegally download or purchase copyright materials. On the other hand if everyone is doing it, why there are still some people getting caught? Not that they should not be punished, but being put into jail and paying a fine that is ridiculously impossible to pay are just practically harsh. Maybe if those people are business tycoons of counterfeit materials, but the fact that most of those people getting caught are just ordinary people trying to be practical and doing what the rest of the world is doing which is doing these “illegal” downloading or purchasing bootlegged movies and music. The government and the entertainment industries are using ordinary people as scapegoats and have been doing draconian methods in moms, children and maybe even old people by suing them for downloading or sharing pirated materials for free, because of the fact that they are having a hard time pursuing the big time “master minds,” who are making a profit out of someone else’s work.
For starters, what is piracy? “Piracy is the illegal use or distribution of software protected under intellectual property laws” (Online Cyber Safety, 2011). In other words, Piracy is when an individual or a company reproduces or uses a copyrighted books, movies, music, recordings, trademarked items, or television programs unauthorized. Piracy on the internet can happen in many ways. The most common and easy to access way is online piracy. Which, involves the illegal way to download a software from peer networks. A peer-to- peer network is when a computers PC is connected to two or more other PCs, which share different resources without going through the proper steps.
All around the world people connected to the internet are downloading free digital content through P2P file sharing software.
Napster is a company that developed the so-called peer-to-peer technology that lets people search and retrieve music files directly from one another's personal computers. When Napster first came out, millions of internet users worldwide were illegally downloading and distributing copyrighted music, videos, images, and software for free. After being vilified by the entertainment industry, which claims that Napster and any similar programs could make piracy of almost any digital work unstoppable, and many court battles, Napster was ordered by court to be shutdown in 2000. The technology has been praised as a revolutionary development for the Internet—unaware of the problems that would arise from such practices. However, the termination of Napster was not enough, months later, dozens of new, like programs were being developed and used. And since Napster, not much has been done to stop these latest downloading programs.