2. Can’t it be stopped by enforcing stricter laws and making content harder to download?
Many recent events have shown that current tactics to stop piracy, such as website shutdown, seizure of property, and more protected files have been ineffective.
In fact, it is now being shown that when legal content is more available, piracy decreases. For example, in 2007, NBC removed their content from iTunes which lead to an 11% increase in piracy. In 2009, ABC began offering their content on Hulu which led to a 37% decrease in piracy.
3. Would lawsuits deter people from pirating?
Many people believe that lawsuits would raise awareness and scare those who pirate files. However, while awareness may have been raised, we have seen over the past few years that piracy is on the rise. This awareness came at a steep cost. From 2006-2008, the RIAA spent $64.7 million on legal fees and only received $1.36 million in settlements.
4. What can I do to help stop Piracy?
One thing you can do to help piracy is to support legal services such as Netflix and Hulu. By doing so, they will have the ability to offer more legal options, thereby reducing piracy.
5. Can Piracy be prevented?
The simple answer is no. Like other forms of crime, piracy will never be fully stopped. The key is to make it unnecessary by making content affordable and accessible. Once the legal option is more appealing than pirating, a massive amount of people will stop pirating.
6. Why is there so much piracy in the different industries?
To understand why there is so much piracy today, we have to look into the past. Since the beginning of sellable music, people have shared their CD’s, cassette tapes, records, etc. with friends and family. Up until recently, however, music couldn’t be shared on massive scales because the quality of the music would suffer. In this scenario, people would usually choose to buy good-quality music instead of acquiring a copy of a copy of a copy. However digital media has now allowed a single track to be copied many times without any degrading of quality. The software industry is hit by piracy the most due to the fact that for a longer period of time people have been able to access good quality copies of software.
More simply though, why wouldn’t people download something for free when it is easy, accepted by society, and almost always free of any ramifications?
Anthony Freitas de Oliveira
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Stephen Phelps
Matthew Langford
Brian Snedden
Cody Pizzaia
Saransh Prasad
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