Assignment 1:
The Low-Down on Piracy
Sales in pirated CD’s and DVD’s are booming. People are buying because it is cheap, easy and accessible. Yet very few buyers consider the consequences of piracy.
By Andrew Rhodes Nørgaard
In this modern day and age, where robbing a bank is near to impossible without getting caught inside 30 minutes, have people found a new way of stealing. Intellectual theft or stealing another persons work, whether it being music or movies. The victims are record labels, music artist, movie producers and film studios. They own the rights to pirated CD’s and DVD’s and every time a pirated CD or DVD is bought it is money out of their pocket. One of the excuses used for justifying piracy is that these artists and corporations earn so much money anyway, so how can one bootleg DVD hurt? It hurts because now everybody is doing it, because for years people have been saying that just one CD or DVD could not hurt. There is a saying that 100 creeks make a river, and that is what has happened, because now everybody is downloading songs and movies off the internet and buying them illegally off the streets. This is not the only reason as to why piracy has boomed; pirated CD’s and DVD’s are much cheaper than their legal brothers, because the “pirate” selling them does not pay a dime to music labels nor film studios. So unfortunately it is a highly profitable business for the pirate and the buyer, the pirate earns money, and the buyer saves money, the only loser is the people who actually own the rights to the CD’s and DVD’s.
All this is an evil circle, because the more people buy bootleg DVD’s and CD’s the higher the price will be on original CD’s and DVD’s to make up for the loss of revenue, and when the price goes up on the originals, then people will buy bootlegs, so they can save money, and it just keeps on and on.
Apart from the economic aspect, there is also the artistic aspect, because the pirates only copy mainstream and very popular...