Internet Piracy
Theft is the action of stealing something that belongs to someone else, but what if that which is stolen is never actually taken? The debate over what is to be done about a current issue involving “internet piracy” has been a hot topic in several countries, including the United States. The issue at hand is a claimed figure that allegedly spans upwards of 250 billion dollars translated to American currency in losses on behalf of several international multimedia franchises according to statistics compiled by the Director’s Guild of America. These losses are observed in franchises including but not limited to: film, music, computer software, video games, publishing, and etc. Despite the claimed numbers of losses and statistics there is a lot of internal conflict among average people over whether or not anything should be done about the matter of “internet piracy” or, as pro-piracy supporters of open media call “file sharing.” Acts of pro-piracy as of late include a petition against recently proposed anti-piracy legislation such as SOPA and PIPA that has received over 7 million signatures according to the Washington Post on January 19th, 2012. This large petitioning body of citizens represents a larger consensus demanding if anything is to be done about the act of file sharing, then many of the citizens of the U.S. do not want to be held responsible or suffer from any legislation proposed with effects such as the closing of websites or restriction of open web access, prosecution of file sharers, or prosecution of site owners. Due to this popular opinion among U.S. citizens, it is inadvisable for the United States government to proceed with any legislation regarding the matter without serious notice of the public opinions regarding current statistics in relation to media economics, and the trending support of open media or “file sharing”. To begin with, current statistics regarding file sharing are among the giant bulk of support for anti-piracy policies.
Cited: Bilton, Nick. "Internet Pirates Will Always Win." www.nytimes.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Aug. 2012.. "Piracy by the Numbers." http://www.dga.org/. Directors Guild of America, n.d. Web. 2010. . Sanchez, Julian. "SOPA, Internet regulation, and the economics of piracy." www.arstechnica.com. N.p., Dec. Web. 18 Jan. 2012. . "SOPA Petition Gets Millions of Signatures as Internet Piracy Legislation Protests Continue." washingtonpost.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 19 Jan. 2012. .