Piracy, it is a problem

On Monday in class, we discussed the issue about piracy. According to W. James Potter, "Piracy, in its simpliest form, is the unauthorized use of copyright material" (p.302). Anything everything can literally be pirated by somebody else, whether it is the music you hear, the book that you read, or the movie that you watch, it can all be pirated by someone else or even you, the reader of this blog, can pirate something. Now, while most people will not come right out and say that they have pirated something illegally, people do it all the time and believe that it is a perfectly fine thing to do, I mean, who would want to pay the money to go see a movie in the movie theather or rent it from a store when they can just burn a copy of it at home on their computer? Most of the people the pirate things believe that they are doing a good thing, when in essence, what they are doing is actually a bad thing and technically, what they are doing is illegal and wrong.

Piracy is a becoming quite the controversial topic, but it is not a recent issue actually. According to what Potter says on pages 303 and 304 of our textbook, "Piracy has been a problem for the music industry for decades. As early as the 1950s, people used tape recorders to pirate music by recording it off the radio. People could also make a copy of a record or tape cassette using home-recording equipment, but to do so, they had to already have a copy of the recording and could make only one copy at a time." Wow, people in the 1950s copying and pirating music off the radio....and to think people are making burnt cds with music on it in today's modern society. People back then where making copies of music on blank cassette players, and that actually kept on happening for quite some time as I actually used to have a couple of cassette tapes with music on it that was copied from radio stations, but now, not just music is being copied illegally as movies are becoming quite to item to pirate nowadays too.

Movies have become to hot commodity to pirate here lately it seems, and pirating movies has gotten so out of hand, the lawsuits have been filed against some websites, especially thepiratebay.org. In the following YouTube video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Qsm1gd8EuA, it talks about how Sweden filed a law-suit against Pirate Bay for breaking Sweden's copyright laws. What ended up happening is that on the second day the law suit was in place, Sweden dropped half of its charges on Pirate Bay because they made a technical error on how a bit torrent works. The lawsuit itself ended up being a rather big financial issue and fines were placed and other things happened, but as of today, Pirate Bay is still up and running, and you can get pirated music, movies, and other things from that website too.

So all in all, I feel that pirating is in fact a big issue although most seem to believe that it is not. Whenever someone makes an illegal copy of a movie, cd, etc they are stealing things that are not theirs from the original creator that made it. Yes, I am sure that people will still be pirating things long after I am gone and I am fully aware of this as well. When people pirate things, they are breaking copyright laws and literally taking away money from the person or people that made the original music, movie, etc. I strongly believe that people should not pirate things illegally from the internet which is way I feel that certain website, expecially music ones like LimeWire, should be taken down, but I am sure that the general consensus would disagree and believe that all pirated websites, not just LimeWire, should stay online because it's an easy way to get music. Pirating will always be a controversial issue to talk about because people feel that getting movies, music, etc from places like piratebay.org is fine, but really, everyone that goes to those type of places are breaking laws and do not seem to care.