Piracy and Privacy

Piracy is something we’ve been seeing since the history of the mankind, this is an old Viking term that means to board someone else’s ship and rob them of all of their treasures to claim as your own. This is an issue for anyone who owns something but someone with a volatile approach takes what they wanted from you, but piracy has taken on a new identity in this day and age. It’s all about media piracy, people will bootleg films and music to sell it at a cheaper rate because it either isn’t readily available or the person looking for the product isn’t in a position to pay full price to experience it. This is something more common than usual because we live in an era where if you don’t experience something from an authorized outlet then you can go to easy lengths to get around that issue to still experience it without having the sign up for any streaming sites, paying for a movie ticket or purchasing an album.

In the article “You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You ” states: “As technology continues to evolve, the battle between pirates and copyright holders is going to escalate, and pirates are always, always going to be one step ahead. What’s clear is that legislation is not the answer. Piracy is already illegal in the US, and most places around the world, yet it persists underground, but more often in plain sight. Short of passing a law that allows the actual blacklisting of websites like China and Iran, there is no legislative solution.  That’s what SOPA and PIPA were attempting to do, but it so obviously trampled on the First Amendment, it was laughed out of existence as the entire internet protested it. The only other thing you could get the internet to agree on was if they tried to institute a ban on cat pictures.” This is something that will go on no matter what happens because there’s so much too people who disagree with their attempts to regulate this issue. This is something that that world will eventually have to come to terms with because this all a rebellious act to help those who don’t have the means to experience the way these production companies package it.

Pirate Bay was a pioneer in this field to spread information on a pirated website, but they never actually broke the law or anything along the lines. This company made sure to just spread the information of where you can find the torrents in order to download the files/software you’re seeking. In the article “The Pirate Bay shutdown: the whole story” states: “the day before the shutdown, nearly 102 million IP addresses were downloading torrented movies and TV shows. That dropped to 95 million the day after the December 9th shutdown, but by last Friday, pirate traffic was back up to just over 100 million IP addresses performing peer-to-peer downloads. A decrease? Sure, but nothing all that dramatic; this is a direct result of the hydra-like nature of piracy outfits in general. More or less, a series of shutdowns led to The Pirate Bay’s rise to prominence anyway. Napster got shut down and LimeWire quickly took its place. LimeWire was replaced by uTorrent, and uTorrent is the current go-to for torrenting”, so this will be the way of life for illegal downloads it seems because as soon as you shut down one outlet, another rises to take the last persons spot. These companies have to battle this from losing their money because as they’re investing in the products to be sold, people are copying them and selling them at a fraction or if you want to run the risk you can download it for free online.

All in all, I personally feel like piracy is hurting the copyright online, but this is also bringing awareness to the issues that these companies face when being in the position they’re in. They have to find a way to make money but at a price point, at a convenience and in timely positions where consumers are willing to invest in the authentic distributer versus going to the internet for a third-party torrent to get it for free. It’s going to be an interesting journey to experience from the consumers perspective to see how major production handles the new problems that may arise from their actions in the first place.

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