Peer to Peer Piracy and the Film Industry
Introduction
Each day an estimated 400,000 films exchange hands through the Internet. Movie piracy, once reserved to pirate syndicates and illegal duplication factories, has become a common staple among college students with high-speed internet access. With advanced compression technology, movie files can be transferred across continents in hours and across campus networks in under ten minutes. File-sharing is seen as a victimless crime, but the motion picture industry is expected to lose $3.5 billion this year alone due to piracy. Pirate activities undermine every aspect of the legitimate filmmaking business since legitimate retailers cannot possibly compete fairly with pirate business. Therefore, piracy negatively affects all aspects of film-making including the studios that invest in the film, the distributors, the retailers and foreign and local filmmakers.
Economic Impact
Intellectual property (TV programs, movies, etc…) is an incredible source of growth for the American economy. Intellectual property is not only America’s largest trade export, but it is creating new jobs at triple the rate of the rest of the economy, and is responsible for more than five percent of the GDP. The movie industry alone has a surplus balance of trade, something no other American company can lay claim to.
Moviemaking is a risky business, for it is not always profitable. Only one in ten films ever recovers its initial investment from theatrical exhibition. In fact, four out of ten movies never recoup the original investment. In 2000, the average studio film cost had a total cost of over $80 million per film. No other industry in the world risks that much capital to make, finance, produce ...
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...ue entertainment in a lawful environment.
The attitude of entitlement that many internet users exhibit with regard to internet piracy must stop. The movie industry will not suffer the pillaging that has been inflicted on the music industry by casual pirates. New efforts to prevent piracy are currently being undertaken and they include research to new technologies to prevent piracy and copying, strengthening laws to inflict harsher penalties for copyright infringement, and educating the public about why copyright protection is imperative to economic growth and the negative effects that file-sharing has on the American consumer.
Works Cited
Valenti, Jack. Thoughts on the Digital Future of Movies, The Threat of Piracy, The Hope of Redemption. Motion Picture Association of American Press Release. 30 Sep. 2003
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...
Wikipedia. (2014, Februaury 18). Searches Incident to a Lawful Arrest. Retrieved February 26, 2014, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searches_incident_to_a_lawful_arrest
An option that copyright owners have considered toward protecting their works from circulating in P2P networks is to use a variety of technological tools to prevent piracy. Such tools would be capable of blocking, decoying and redirecting the connections of unauthorized copyrighted file transfers. However, federal and state laws such as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of ...
On November 16th, 2004, the MPAA announced it would begin launching lawsuits against a select group of P2P users accused of possessing and/or transmitting copyrighted films. These lawsuits, in the same vain as the RIAA’s ongoing legal offensive, are meant to intimidate other P2P users to cease and desist any illegal activities involving movies[1].
A study by John Schmitt of the Center for Economic and Policy Research explores the other possible reasons a modest increase in the minimum wage may not significantly impact employment levels. According to his study instead of hiring less workers the labor markets can respond in the following ways:
When the federal minimum wage was signed into law it was $0.25 per hour, that equals about $4.18 today taking into account inflation only effected about 20% of the entire work force. (Patton, 2014) According to an article published by Forbes (2014), in 2012 there were about 275.3 million workers earring an hourly wage who were over 16 years of age, out of that group only about 3.6 million were being paid minimum wage or lower. The article further explains the
There are pros to standardized examinations as tools for gaining information about student’s literacy strengths and weaknesses that can influence instruction. A pro to standardized examinations is that every student in the same state will take the same tests. This allows a precise comparison between schools. There are negatives to this comparing schools in this manner. These are that some schools or specific educators are obligated to teach to the test. Educators are suffering from an extreme amount of pressure to prove they are effective educators. Regrettably, the primary statistic judged is the success of their student’s performance on these standardized examinations. Some school reprimand there educator if too many students fail thus, scaring educators to teach to the test.
To begin, an overview of the story seems to be in order. Pip, the story’s main character and protagonist, grows up in the working class, working in a forge with his lifelong friend Joe, an uneducated man who knows his work and that’s about it. One day, as a young boy, Pip is set upon by an escaped convict whom he decides to be kind too and fetches him food and drink. Not long after the gift is received, the convict is captured and hauled off to prison. Sometime after the incident with the escaped convict, Pip is summoned to the home of a rather wealthy woman by the name of Miss Havisham. To call this woman despicable would be an understatement as she is unable to let go of a grudge she holds against a previous lover who left her at the altar long ago. She sees all men as worthless, evil and useless and plans to use a small child by the name of Estella, a young girl whom Pip meets upon ...
The main character, Pip, is a gentle character. His traits include humbleness, kindness, and lovingness. These traits are most likely the cause of his childhood poverty. In the beginning of the story, Pip is a mild mannered little boy who goes on with his own humble life. That, though, will change as he meets Magwich, a thief and future benefactor. Pip’s kindness goes out to help the convict, Magwich when he gives food and clothing to him. Magwich tells Pip that he’ll never forget his kindness and will remember Pip always and forever. This is the beginning of Pip’s dynamic change. Throughout the novel, Great Expectations, the character, Pip gradually changes from a kind and humble character to a character that is bitter, then snobbish and finally evolves into the kind and loving character which he was at the beginning of the story.
...t the novel as well as their personal development as characters. Although pip is blinded by the face value of the high-class life by Estella and Miss Havisham, as the novel progresses the reader discovers the sacrifices and heartache suffered by the wealthy female characters. We discover, along with Pip that wealth does not equal to happiness, nobility and does not make one a gentleman. Instead the lower class female character Biddy is the novels true moral compass, and is rewarded for her appreciation of the life she has been born into and ability to make the best of the situation. The journey Pip is escorted on by these female characters through the different social classes has a significant effect on his progression into adulthood. Essentially, Pip's great expectations are ruined, and because of that he becomes a better man and some would say, a true gentleman.
It is a highly popular theory amongst economists that minimum wage will result in an increase in unemployment. The classical approach to the effect of minimum wage on the labour force is that when the minimum wage is above the equilibrium wage it will cause unemployment. Through the early work of Brown, Gilroy, and Kohen (1982), this view became popular amongst economists. There research found that “the most frequently studied group in the empirical literature is teenagers. Time-series studies typically find that a 10 per-cent increase in the minimum wage reduces teenage employment by 1 to 3 per-cent.” (Brown, Gilroy, and Kohen,
“Only two years ago, it took 72 days to get a highly watchable version of "Finding Nemo" online.” (Hernandez) Today, in the world of movie piracy this would rarely happen though. Most box office releases are available online within a few days or even hours of the box office release. “Last summer's blockbuster "Spider-Man 2," for example, was downloadable in first-rate form within seven hours of its premiere to the public…” (Hernandez). This shows that movie piracy is becoming more important to internet users, and piracy will continue to grow unless something is done about the problem.
Oswalt, A., (2008). Early childhood physical development: gross and fine motor development. Retrieved from http://www.bhcmhmr.org/poc/view_doc.php?type=doc&id=12755&cn=462
At the start of the novel, Pip is a poor uneducated orphan boy unaware of social classes, or even the existence of such things. As a result, he is content with what he has and who he knows. Moving on in life, he comes across new people from all spectrums of social classes, and his content turns to shame and greed, as he longs to be “better”. All of a sudden Pip becomes ashamed of both his family and his social class. As Pip begins to understand the true meaning of life, his childish attitude does however change. “Pip learns as he grows older, however, that having money and power and being of a higher social class is not necessarily better than having true friends that care about him - even if they are of a lower social class” (Bloom, “Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations” 236). As the aforementioned quote suggests, in the final stages of the story Pip’s mindset changes for the better and Pip is able to give up having the “money and the power” and focuses ...
The subject of my paper focuses on movie piracy. Movie Piracy by definition is the illegal copying of movies for personal or commercial use. This is a new epidemic that is affecting the film industry financially on a global level. What are the necessary steps that can be taken on behalf of the film industry that can stop this illegal practice from occurring? Once you walk down the city streets of New York, you can easily find vendors selling their bootleg DVD copies of new released movies for half the price of a movie ticket. At the moment the quality of the movies aren’t at its best, but with the technological advancements, the quality of these bootleg DVD’s are getting better, which means that movie piracy is actually on the rise. This continues to worry both film studios and copyright activist. Movie companies are the ones suffering the most from this illegal practice. While they continue to produce $100 million movies, their profits continue to fall, when people decide to either pick up a burned copy or download the movie off some illegal Internet site. This essay takes a look at the different forms of movie piracy and what different organizations, such as the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and its international counterpart, MPA (Motion Picture Association), are doing to combat this illegal practice.