Piracy

Many of us have committed piracy once or twice in our lives. No, not the Pirates of The Caribbeans kind of piracy (though, we will also talked about that subject in this blog). What I mean is intellectual piracy, or copyright infringement.

Do you care about copyright?

The Pirate Bay, Mediafire, Megaupload... these are some among the many websites that allows people to upload files and share them with the world. This means that anyone with access to these pages can download the files and use them as they may. Sometimes this is okay because those files maybe free or personal. But most of the times, people used these sites to upload copyrights contents so that everyone can use it. This means that contents that you normally have to pay to get access to are now free for everyone.

AKA: Their Hell, Our Heaven

I know some of you might think "So? This is awesome, right?" Well to you guys it may be very cool to get all these free stuffs (who doesn't like free stuffs?). But to the people who spent their time, hard work, and money to created these files, this is not something to laugh about. Watching files that you spent days, months, years to make is now being distributed everywhere for free without your permission is rather heart-breaking.

Right in the adulthood

Copyright infringement has been a huge problems for media industries for decades. Companies that produce games, musics, films, programs... are struggling with the fact that people are getting these companies' products for free from the Internet. This results in a huge lost in their revenue because a majority of users don't pay for the files. Now you may think it's awesome to get these stuffs for free but for these companies, intellectual piracy can lead them to bankruptcy.

Bankruptcy = Game Over

So how can we solve this problem? First of all, I must say we're extremely fortunate that this isn't the 18th century and we're not committing actual piracy. Why? Because back then, committing piracy means you'll end up in jail at the very least. There are also hanging, decapitation, dancing the hempen jig, and the absolute worst is being lock in a steel cage and hang in the air until your flesh rotted (which takes about 2 years). The most twisted part is that people enjoy coming to see your death like it's some kind of sport event. Nowadays, the worst intellectual piracy can get is jail and pay for compensation. No rotted flesh!

Who knew so many people came to see someone die?

Also worth mentioning is that copyright infringement happens on the Internet, which makes it harder to find the culprit. Some might say "there should be a law against online piracy". That maybe true, but it's too complicated to create a law that can protects major businesses while not harming the small ones. It's because we haven't define content that is needed to be protect from piracy. Is taking a quote from a Facebook post piracy? Is taking a portion of a video clip violated copyrights? How about an image on Google?

Netflix believes it's the solution to online piracy

It's true that online piracy is very difficult to deal with. But in my opinion, there's nothing that humans can't do. We just need to put our minds and our resources (lots and lots of resources) together and figure out a way to protect companies and industries from online piracy. It may take years, thousands of people, and millions of dollars. But i believe that if people are strong enough to work together toward a common goal (in this case preventing online piracy) ,with the right amount of time and resources, we can achieve the impossible and once again bring back the fairness to businesses all around the world.

Here are some links about solutions to piracy that you may find interested:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2012/01/17/how-to-fix-online-piracy/
http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2009/apr/07/france-solution-online-piracy