A seemingly victimless crime of XXI century, in other words known as piracy has plagued every place with the Internet access. Resulting in over 300,000 redundancies annually and thus sufficiently harming the economy, piracy is still thought to be an innocent way of saving one’s pocket money. But no matter how many strict steps are taken to eradicate it, as long as there are exclusive masterpieces there will always remain those willing to copy them.
Firstly, the definition of the intellectual property should be clarified for further ease of explaining different ways of its protecting.
Intellectual property is something you create that’s unique. It includes copyright, patents and trademarks, and can be something you invent, like a new product, a product’s design or appearance, a brand or logo, written work, like content on a website or in a brochure, artistic work, like photography or illustrations, computer software or film recordings or musical compositions. (How to protect your intellectual property)
Although prohibited by the law, piracy rapidly spreads around the world from lively city centers to the most remote areas. Easy profits have always been lucrative to those who are not of hardworking nature, but having a business violating the copyright law can lead to a 5 year jail time and a fine of $250,000. Probably every second person in the world at least once in the lifetime purchased a pirated movie or downloaded music from unauthorized sources, thus committed an infringement of copyright. It is rather hard to admit that free content available on the Internet or cheap counterfeit DVDs purchased from a vendor’s stall can do any harm to an average user. Moreover such bargains could be of a great use to those trying to save some of their budget. On the other hand, consumers’ effort to cut their expenses on movies, video games, music etc. by using their pirated versions results in the US entertainment industry losing an approximate amount of $6 bn. each year. “Our nation’s film and TV business is critical to our economy” (Couts)
There has already been a number of steps taken to eradicate or at least to prevent a rapid spread of unauthorized copies of movies. As an example could be a decision of Verizon, AT&T and Time Warner to lower the speed of the Internet connection if a user was proven to download pirated movies or any other content. But before the accusation a person would be warned 6 times of infringing on intellectual property. Another example of fighting piracy in the US is adoption of intellectual property protection acts, such as Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Protect IP Act (PIPA) and the OPEN Act, all basically standing for ceasing existence of companies involved in counterfeiting. Despite being of roughly the same goal, the acts stated above contain different approaches to fighting piracy.
The supporters of SOPA stand for any Internet provider being forced to immediately cease its cooperation with a source accused of piracy; in case of disobedience the provider will be regarded …