Pros and Cons of Piracy and the RIIA

The Pros & Cons of Illegal Downloading!!!
Pros for illegal downloading:
    You can download anything at anytime even if it’s a song a movie and it does not have its best quality.
    You will save a lot of money illegally downloading programs online.
    You can download it and see if you like it or not.

Cons for illegal downloading:
    Actors and Musicians losing money because you are pirating their work.

    You are breaking the law you are the one taking the risk to get caught and having a criminal record.

    Possibility of getting banned from the Internet.

    Downloading files illegally have a risk of getting a virus

Now what is the real problem !!!

After doing some research online and read about the RIAA ( Recording Industry Association of America) I checked their website and it was very interesting information that they had in the statistics  about  how much piracy has caused the revenue to go down. They talked abut how the music business has increased in digital revenues by 1000% from 2004 to 2010 but the digital music theft has been a major factor behind the overall global market decline around 31 percent in the same period of time.
Some of the statistics from the digital music theft:
                  -Sense P2P file-sharing site Napster opened in 1999 music sales in the U.S. dropped 53%
                  -From 2004 to 2009 about 30 million songs where downloaded illegally
                  -NPD reported that only 37 % if music downloaded in the U.S.  in 2009 was legally bought
                                   
                  It is unbelievable knowing that only 37 % of the music bought by consumers was legally and the rest of the music was illegally downloaded form the internet. People have been pirating music software movies for a long period of time even the time when movies were in tapes and songs where in cassettes. Since the 1999 till 2009 only 35 % of people that download music illegally knew that file-sharing was illegal but after the initiation of the end-user legal campaign the number went up to 70 %.

                  I think because people download music, software and movies for free online illegally the companies have raised their prices of their product so they can make some income. If the companies dropped the prices to a reasonable price do you think that people would actually buy the product instead of downloading illegally?
                 

Reference

Governmental Prevention of Piracy

            Piracy has a devastating effect on the American economy. There is not an exact amount of money associated to the loss; however, the estimated cost of piracy on the U.S. economy is roughly $100 billion annually. The U.S. Government has been trying to find a way to reduce the amount of pirated items online. People pirate music, movies, software, books, and intellectual property.

            In order to prevent people from pirating the government is looking to enforce the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). This is act is designed to crack down on websites based offshore that peddle illegal content. However, the argument is that the SOPA will entitle the government and copyright holders to too much control over the Web. In some cases it could order an Internet service provider like Verizon to cut off access to a site, or a search engine like Google could be told to delete links to an infringing site.

The U.S. Government states the SOPA will enforce:

·         It’ll stop illegal foreign websites from stealing and selling America’s technology and inventions, and keeping the profits for themselves.

·         It is NOT censorship of legal actions online, only activity which is already illegal.

·         It does not threaten the Internet as a tool of communications or commerce.

·         It will help to put money back into America’s economy and helps to rebuild the jobs that were loss due to piracy.

The SOPA act got a lot of attention from Google, Wikipedia, WordPress, Mozilla and many more companies that do not want the SOPA to be enforced. Could you imagine a world without Wikipedia? How would we write our papers anymore! How do you feel SOPA would be beneficial and in which ways would be harmful?

Reference

Why would you pirate?

                                                              Why would you pirate? 

Reference 

I read an article online and view the speech on YouTube about what the entrepreneur, investor and a former head of Google SA Stafford Masie said during the 2012 Product of the year awards.
            Masie said “ I believe people are inherently good and evil, if you give something fairly priced with the necessary flexibility and a means to join access to it wherever they are I think you’ll destroy piracy.”
            He also said “People what to pay for things and that is evidenced by success of iTunes and the increase in music sales it caused. People who would have otherwise pirated their music from services such as Napster and Bit Torrent instead opted to use iTunes because it was conveniently on terms they could accept, and easier on their science.”
            He does make a point because it is a genius idea with Apple making iTunes to where you can download a song for 99 cent and it look so cheap compared to having it for 1 dollar it is a form marketing as much at it is mentally for people to think that is cheap and it does not look like you are buying for an expensive price. People have been pirating online for a very long time but the fact that you can go into iTunes and sample a song from an album for free and you can purchase its song for .99 cent it will make people think about getting the songs or buy the alblums that they like for a cheap price or take the risk of pirating the music online and getting caught downloading illegally and getting a fine or possibly getting charged with crime.
            Apple making iCloud which stores your music, photos, apps, calendars, documents, and more and wirelessly pushes them to all your devices. With you downloading a song for .99 cent you can easily have them in all of your devices so if you are not home and you are in a road trip, at the gym you can play the music in the iPod, iPhone, iPad.  

Would you  take the risk of downloading songs illegally and getting caught with a fee up to $250,000 or sample the album and download each song for .99 cent ? 

How to Prevent Piracy?

             My Reference

            Going out to buy that new CD that finally released after you’ve been waiting for what seems like forever is always a lot of fun. You run to the store and ask the sales associate where it is located and then you suddenly find yourself staring at the album cover. You take it to the register to purchase it, go to your car and you begin to carefully unwrap the plastic covering. It is finally open and you take out that old CD and you put in the new one. Next thing you know your cruising home listening to your new favorite album. That’s how it goes right? Isn’t that how everyone feels when they finally get their hands on that new CD they’ve been dying to hear?

                It would be nice if that was the case. That would mean the retail stores are receiving income, the record labels are getting paid, and most of all your favorite artists are being supported; however,  it seems like in today’s market no one is purchasing music anymore. The revolution of MP3 players has tremendously impacted the music organization. People are beginning to feel like CD’s are more of a hassle than anything else.

                Don’t get me wrong, it is still main stream to obtain music physically rather than digitally; yet, it is only a matter of time until that will change. Since 2003 digital content has been exploding. It is easy, convenient and it is nearly accessible from any device. Piracy plays a critical role in the music industry because now people can easily pirate individual songs and full albums. Pirating has tremendously impacted the music industry’s profit. Most people justify their illegal actions of pirating music by saying that record companies make so much money that one album being downloaded by them won’t hurt their profits. However, since 2000 there has been a near 36% decline in the revenue within the music industry.

                Piracy is affecting record labels, artist, and jobs. The decline in sales has become disturbing. It is simple, pirating music is stealing music. People who are caught pirating music can suffer jail time and/or large fines since they are ignoring the copyright laws. Piracy is becoming increasingly popular with college students. Many kids in college love to listen to music. I see young adults always plugged into their MP3 players with their headphones on, rather they are in school, home, or in public. Music is embedded into our culture and into our routine daily lives.

HOW TO PREVENT PIRACY?

                However, if everyone pirates music than how can the music industry survive? It is critical for people to understand that buying music enables the recording company to promote our favorite artists and to produce the albums that we all love. What are some ways that we as students can do our due diligence by not pirating music and preventing other people from pirating music? 

When Stealing Isn’t Stealing

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/opinion/theft-law-in-the-21st-century.html?pagewanted=all

 

        If we will ask different people about piracy, about if he or she himself pirated music or movies.They probably answer no, they don’t. They enjoy the satisfaction they receive from buying a new album or movie knowing that they have supported them. Another people would probably say yes, they do see movies for free, so they really have no need to pirate movies.

What role does Internet piracy play in you life? We pirate a lot. We haven’t bought  many movies. Games and computer software we tend to buy but we do pirate from time to time as well.

Why we do piracy? Is it really big amount money of savings or people have another ideas to do so? Somebody would say: "The music industry doesn’t deserve my money.  They make their money on touring with me or without. As movies are concerned, 90% of them are just plain terrible. The movie industry has pretty much run out of ideas so much that like the music industry they don’t deserve my money.”

 But let's think about this problem from other site.

Word of mouth has always been the biggest marketing instrument for the industry and people who I know how download movies, advise the rest of their  friends how good that movie is and easy to get for free. That makes easy to people going to see it at the cinema or to purchasing it on DVD. In addition many people who we know who download movies tend to purchase them on DVD when they come out anyway, that is if the movie was any good.

           The thing about piracy is that the quality of the pirated film is usually not as good as than the real legal DVD movie. I would much rather watch a movie the way it was meant to be displayed to the world instead of watch it from person who sneaked a camcorder into a theater. Sure, movie tickets are not really cheap, but why should they be? When you purchase a movie ticket, you are not just paying to see a movie, you are paying for the whole movie-going experience, the kind of experience that cannot be replicated anywhere else. When you download a pirated movie online for free, you can expect a cheap product and experience in return.

What’s the true cost of piracy?

http://venturebeat.com/2012/03/15/true-cost-piracy/

      As we can see on Infographic , the true cost of piracy is close to zero. Piracy neither creates nor destroys money. It may redirect money from one industry to another, but not lose them. Let’s look at this situation from penniless students side, who cannot afford to go to the cinema or do not have a expansive movie on their computers. The movie industry would let us believe they have lost money. 

          Let’s look at reality, if piracy was somehow made impossible overnight and all illegal copies destroyed. The students would still be penniless, and the movie industry would be no richer from it. Other industries like advertising will lose even much more money, then they could possibly earn on “free download” sites. 

      However, most of the time there are negative and positive sides of theme. I suggest not only see statistic, and listen somebody’s comments, but also know how to read, and analyze information.