By+Haeryon+Choi

 Piracy and it's Social Impact Haeryon Choi #4

Ms. Perla Zamora

Technology 8A

April 7, 2011




 * Ok, before you can understand the social impact of piracy, you have to know what "piracy" really means. When you think of piracy, first you might think of the pirates in the world who do bad things and harass people. However, the "piracy" which I want to explain to you is the one related to technology. It is when you reproduce or use something copyrighted -- music, books, movies, tv, inventions -- without permission. So now, that know what piracy is, let's learn about the social impacts. **

Nowadays, there are many programs called P2P (peer-to-peer). These programs allow people to download music, software, movies, pictures, etc. While a lot of sites require payment, such as iTunes, there are a lot of sites that do not. This makes them illegal because they allow free downloading and therefore the people who originally made those items are not getting money. These kinds of sites are bad because they are taking money from the original producers. The actors, artists, authors, and anybody else involved can't earn money for their work. While they would still earn money by selling CDs, theatre tickets, DVDs, and books there are not many people who buy those things at the store anymore. Most of the people in this modern society use their friend the internet to download all those things so later, there's nothing left for the original people involved. This is affecting businesses, people's incomes, the stock market, and even people's morals. People now think that downloading something for free is normal. No, that is illegal. We should prevent them from doing those things.

The reason why people are downloading products illegally is because they want to save money; however, this just makes them dishonorable people. It is not only about downloading. People also make copies of these products without permission, known as bootlegged, and sell them for profit. This is not correct. This is stealing. ** Well, the piracy issues are not affecting only the authors. It is affecting the whole economy of the country, because there are many authors whose works are being downloaded illegally. Now they don't earn much money as before and the companies who make all the products are getting less income, the stock market would also decrease. According to the BBC news writer Peter Feuilherade, Hollywood lost 3.5 billions in 2003. I think it is not a good idea to download illegally. We need to come up with a resolution for it, which is stop downloading illegally. **Whenever those people are caught, they should pay penalties for it. Although there are many people downloading legally, factories that make CDs might lose their money and probably a few years later the number of factories that make CDs would decrease. If the piracy issue continues all over the world, this society couldn't be easily healed and there might be a big problem in the stock market. So even you, the ones who are reading this article, stop downloading music or anything illegally!! Pay for what you have to!!

bibliography: - "The Impact of Piracy." //Magellan Media Partners//. Web. 07 Apr. 2011. [].

 - "What Are the Economic and Social Consequences of Counterfeiting and Piracy?" //WIPO - World Intellectual Property Organization//. Web. 07 Apr. 2011. [].

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