Digital Media Piracy

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Digital Media Piracy

Digital Media; as in software, music, movies, books, and anything else which can be stored in binary representation, which then, can be so conveniently transmitted across the globe over the world wide web to anyone and everyone, with total disregard to any copyright laws what so ever, which is where the piracy part comes in.

Probably not too long after the computer was first invited, someone sat down and wrote a useful piece of software, and then not too long after that, some guy copied that piece of software and probably thought it was pretty nifty trick. Well, fast forward a few decades and repeat the process a few billion times, or at least the copying part, and you have what the software piracy situation is today. Globally, it is estimated that $11.75 billion dollars worth of software was pirated in the year 2000[1], $4.2 billion is lost to music piracy[2], and a whopping $30 billion in movie piracy[3]. What is a bit of a mystery however is that people are doing it with so little disregard to the law or moral consideration. In America, people are generally honest and upright citizens, I have seen many new reports in which they purposely drop wallets on city streets, and to there surprise, most were returned, and few were missing any cash. So why is it that despite having generally morally good people do people give copyright infringements such poor consideration. These and other issue are what I will try to explore.

Software piracy is a complicated issue with no simple solutions or simple causes. First we’ll try to explain the reason why people might commit software piracy, and then we’ll attempt to explore how they might rationalize there actions.

There are most likely many factors wh...

... middle of paper ...

..., “Sixth Annual BSA Global Software Piracy Study”, May 2001

[5] http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08603a.htm, “Philosophy of Immanuel Kant”, 2003

[6] http://www.victorianweb.org/philosophy/phil4.html, “Emotionalist Moral Philosophy: Sympathy and the Moral Theory that Overthrew Kings”, 1988

[7] http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/revenge, “Revenge”

[8] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/09/09/the_riaa_sees_the_face/, “The RIAA sees the face of evil, and it's a 12-year-old girl”, September 2003

[9] http://news.com.com/2100-1023_3-245518.html, “SDMI offers $10,000 challenge to hackers”, September 2000

[10] http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200010/msg00050.html, “Researchers Crack Digital Music Challenge”, October 2000

[11] http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,111304,00.asp, “Apple Touts ITunes Success”, June 2003

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