The Escalation of Piracy

The Escalation of Piracy

Copyright laws were created in the late 1700s to protect authors from having their work reproduced without their consent. These laws have been in effect ever since in most parts of the world and have done little changing to keep up with the times. Piracy is the unauthorized use or reproduction of copyrighted or patented material. Piracy has been an issue for many years, but is gaining more and more press recently because it is getting out of control. Everything from books to video games are being pirated and it is costing their respective industries billions of dollars.

There are varying degrees of piracy, and can be considered anything form downloading an artist’s song form KaZaA or mass distributing illegal copies of expensive business software.I will first discuss the casual pirate. This can be defined as anyone who violates copyright laws and steals intellectual property for their own use. This includes downloading music, movies, or software, or burning copies of these. The second form of piracy is the pirate that distributes this material for a profit. These pirates will buy or steal a copy of a program, and sell it on the internet for a fraction of the actual selling cost. The thing with digital reproduction is that a copy is exactly the same as the original, no quality loss. On top of that it costs the pirate nothing to produce, max 40 cents. That way he can sell the pirated software for whatever he wants. A 6000 dollar program can sell for anywhere between 100-500 dollars.

The latter of the two of these forms of pirates have historically been the target the industries and government have been trying to stop. But recently most of the press has been going to the causal pirate. Peer to peer networks and the increasing popularity of faster broadband connections have led to a dramatic increase in illegal downloads. Anyone with an internet connection has instant access to music, movies, software, even video games to download for free. The most popular of these downloads however is by far music downloads. According to a February 2004 article form Wired Magazine’s website on a Monday morning at 10:00 there were about 3.1 million people sharing on KaZaA. And that is not peak time. This number far surpasses Napster’s numbers in its hay day.

The fact is that peer to peer sharing is here to stay and there is vary little the RIAA can do to stop it.