The Importance Of Internet Piracy

Internet Piracy In today’s society, piracy of intellectual property is one of the most common activities on the internet. Intellectual property has become more and more important to the modern world, because the reliance on technologies has increased significantly over the past decade, and much intellectual property has been digitalized. The majority of the public is not aware of the importance of intellectual property rights, because intellectual property can be easily obtained by everyone. Creators throughout the world have many problems with piracy, especially the entertainment industry. Peer-to-peer file-sharing websites are the one common place where anyone can download others’ intellectual property easily and quickly, which was let to

Without laws and regulations, such as copyright, patents, and trademarks, new ideas would not be invented often, because people can steal the work or idea easily without any criminal penalties. In the comic “Doonesbury” created by Garry Trudeau, an American social and political cartoonist, it portrays one of the main problems of society situation on internet piracy. The comic showed that internet piracy is another way people steal something that has a real value from the internet by using file-sharing websites. Even though people understand it is not right to use file-sharing websites, the majority of the public does not see the problems with using it (Trudeau 641). In a study from 2011, 70% of online users find online piracy socially acceptable (Masnick). There are laws that are created to protect the creators, but they have not been fully enforced to punish the society for intellectual property piracy, and that is the reason why the internet piracy rate has not gone down in the past decades. Creators are motivated to create new ideas because they want to gain something out of it, whether it is fame or revenue, or both. They invest time and money in order to create quality works, and people could just go to the internet and find it quickly without permission and paying anything or giving them any credit for using

Businesses try to protect their secrets as best as possible, but there is no way to completely protect intellectual property rights, because there are billions of illegal files that are being downloaded each week (Smith 634). It is impossible to press criminal charges on everyone that violates copyright laws. Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford Law School and the founder of Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society, wrote his views on intellectual property in the article “Some Like It Hot.” Lessig stated, “The question we should be asking about file-sharing is how best to preserve its benefits while minimizing the wrongful harm it causes artist” (Lessig 639). In reality, file-sharing websites have disadvantages towards artists and creators, because it benefits the public to download illegal files without consequences. Peer-to-peer file-sharing websites have impacted the economy, businesses, and workers throughout the world in several different ways. It is harder and harder for creators to gain revenues out of their works, because people tend to avoid paying for any content to save money, and the majority of the public are used to downloading the desired contents for free, especially music, movies, and books. All of these factors cause the demand of purchasing intellectual property to go down, which lead to billions of economic losses each year due to piracy. For example, music sales are