Copyright Law and Online Piracy
Copyright law and online piracy Copyright law it a branch of intellectual property law, and varies from country to country, but, in general, it has a common background; the creator of an immaterial good – such a formula, a song, a movie – has the sole ownership of it for a limited amount of time and can decide who can use it, modify or benefit from it.
Online piracy is the act of sharing on the internet, through different means such as peer to peer channels or torrents, copyrighted files and programs without the consensus of the copyright holder. Although this was not a big issue in the early days of the internet, with slow connections and a limited amount of internet users, in the recent years it has caused enormous losses to the music, film and program industries. The most accurate recent data affirm that “ the total loss to U.S. sound recording producers from physical piracy is estimated as $1.630 billion”1. Of course, piracy existed before the invention of the internet. Some may argue that scribes monks were the first pirate, given that they copied book without anybody’s permission but, more recently, bootlegs (that is, unofficial recordings) of concert and the habit of recording songs from the radio through cassette players were far from unusual. Nobody was worried about this kind of piracy because it was very laborious and did not allow the pirate to make an infinite amount of copies without expense: for one person to copy a cassette or a vinyl took time and raw materials, and it would have been, if not cheaper, less time consuming to directly buy the album. Then the internet came, and everything changed. In 1999 the first service of online exchange became active, and suddenly it was possible to copy the same file over and over: not only it was free, but it also took less time to download the same file over and over: not only it was free, but it also took less time to download the free album than to go to the store and physically buy it. The era of
Online piracy is the act of sharing on the internet, through different means such as peer to peer channels or torrents, copyrighted files and programs without the consensus of the copyright holder. Although this was not a big issue in the early days of the internet, with slow connections and a limited amount of internet users, in the recent years it has caused enormous losses to the music, film and program industries. The most accurate recent data affirm that “ the total loss to U.S. sound recording producers from physical piracy is estimated as $1.630 billion”1. Of course, piracy existed before the invention of the internet. Some may argue that scribes monks were the first pirate, given that they copied book without anybody’s permission but, more recently, bootlegs (that is, unofficial recordings) of concert and the habit of recording songs from the radio through cassette players were far from unusual. Nobody was worried about this kind of piracy because it was very laborious and did not allow the pirate to make an infinite amount of copies without expense: for one person to copy a cassette or a vinyl took time and raw materials, and it would have been, if not cheaper, less time consuming to directly buy the album. Then the internet came, and everything changed. In 1999 the first service of online exchange became active, and suddenly it was possible to copy the same file over and over: not only it was free, but it also took less time to download the same file over and over: not only it was free, but it also took less time to download the free album than to go to the store and physically buy it. The era of