Is Piracy Ethical Essay

WHY PIRACY IS UNETHICAL

On one hand, many people believe that pirating music and movies is unethical. Millions of people waiting to see the brand new episodes of popular television shows such as ‘Game of Thrones’ will illegally download the episodes before they are premiered. What they are actually doing is violating intellectual property rights (Barry, 2015).

In 2005, an anti-piracy campaign advert called ‘Piracy, It’s A Crime’ was released by Motion Picture Association, shown in opening sequences of DVDs, to compare digital piracy to stealing (Piracy, It 's A Crime, 2011). In the advert, the words clearly read “You wouldn’t steal a car. You wouldn’t steal a handbag. You wouldn’t steal a television. You wouldn’t steal a movie.” What follows is “Downloading pirated films is stealing, stealing is against the law. Piracy, It’s A Crime”. Their view is that piracy and theft is the same thing because you are unlawfully taking something that belongs to someone else, so if someone breaks this law then they can be fined or jailed (Association, 2005).

In one scenario your friend buys a CD and lets you borrow it,

One of the camps who thought it was the ‘right’ thing believed that intellectual property should be freely accessible to everyone. They think that intellectual property restricts access to ideas and expression in an unfair way and downloading pirated music and films is a victimless crime with no significant cost, and the punishments that come with illegal downloading are too harsh and unjustified (Barry, 2015). People who do not think that piracy is ethically wrong come up with all kinds of excuses, some of which are interesting but unsatisfactory arguments. The strongest argument was that stealing means taking the original item while downloading them makes a copy of the original file and leaves the original intact, therefore piracy is not stealing (Cohen,