In Conclusion

I’d like to leave whoever is out there reading this with my final thoughts on what I’ve learned by writing this blog. Throughout my research online it seems that in terms of online piracy, it’s the people against the corporations and the government. And I believe this completely. In the last couple years several bills have attempted to be introduced into our law structure, and they have all failed miserably. Many influential sites protested them, and eventually they were all shelved. Many of these bills tried to invade our privacy by monitoring the Internet and having the option to control it. The internet is pretty much a lawless society, anything can end up on there and once it’s on, it’s there for good. How could they possibly think it would be controlled? So how would they stop Piracy? I mentioned in our class presentation that they only way to deal with piracy is to compete with it. Why are these organizations and government agents attempting to stop it altogether and spending more money then necessary. They should really just embrace it and come up with ways of competing, because piracy isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. So to wrap it up, until the government decides to become a totalitarian state, it’s pretty much up to you whether you download files illegally or not… Keep on rockin’ in the free world!

Dinner or music? It's an easy choice for students

Why are the claims against Piracy put out by organizations such as the Institute of Policy Innovation or the Record Industry Association of America so outrageous? Well, these companies hate losing money, even a penny. And a penny is a lot closer to what they are actually losing compared to billions of dollars and thousands of jobs that are supposedly lost from piracy. You’d think that if this were actually true, the economy would be even further into the shitter than it already is (well, at least in the states). But what I would like to do is take a look at how the economy might not be losing any kind of revenue even with piracy. I am speaking solely from the point of a university student on a shoestring budget so bear with me here. Let’s say Joe Guy has 10 dollars and his favorite bands new album just came out, but he also needs to buy food for dinner, and coincidentally his friend just sent him the link to a torrent site for that album. So now he can get dinner (money into the economy) and also hear his favorite music. As I’ve mentioned before no one in my generation is going to pick paying money for an album over buying food. It’s not a big deal to them… Steal dinner or an album online, what would you do?

Hollywood isn't giving us much of a choice

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This article is a pretty interesting read. It claims that Hollywood is actually pushing people towards online piracy. There are a few reasons behind this claim, which I believe to be pretty spot on. First off, DVD sales are going downhill – fast. And all in all, so are movie rentals in general, even though there seems to be a large market online for such a service. Remember Blockbuster? The next generation probably won’t just like the latest generation barely knows what a floppy disc is. The thing is, people don’t like renting movies anymore, and as much as online rental services are convenient, there are still many drawbacks. These drawbacks include the following. You don’t get all the extras that come on a DVD, but you’re still paying for the full rental price. You also have a 24 hour time restriction to your digital rental, seems a bit short considering places like blockbuster had 3 and 7 day rentals and no late fees. But the biggest drawback of all, is digital rentals don’t have some of the best movies out there simply because big Hollywood execs just won’t release the rights. You don’t want to give the people what they want legally, so why are you so surprised people are downloading the same things for free and at their convenience? It’s a no brainer.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-hollywood-encouraging-onine-piracy 

The most pirated movies of all time

This summer Daniel Bukszpan, a writer for CNBC, did some research in order to find out the titles of the top 5 most pirated films of all time. They are in order:

• Avatar (2009) with 21 million illegal downloads
• [Tie] The Dark Knight (2008) 19 million downloads
• [Tie] Transformers (2007) 19 million downloads
• Inception (2010) 18 million downloads
• The Hangover (2009) 17 million downloads

Personally if I were to pirate one of these films I delete it after I have watched it. The iTunes Store charges $4.99 to rent a standard quality version of a movie for 2 days. If the 21 million downloads of Avatar were rented on the iTunes Store the estimated value of lost revenue equals $105 million. Avatar's gross box office revenue was $2.78 billion and cost $237 million to make. If you add the sunk revenue from piracy and the cost of the film you get $347 million which is a mere 12% of total potential revenue... And iTunes is expensive!

The Wild Wild East

This beautiful place is Podgorica, Montenegro where online piracy is an enormous industry. It's estimated that 83% of all software and software accounts are pirated. This is the highest level in the region but surrounding countries use between 40-70% pirated software. The country is also responsible for hosting the servers of services that provide safety for pirated document storage. ProjectFreeTV.me has fluctuated in relevance over the past 5 years but has always been located in Montenegro. Oliver Obradovic of Microsoft Montenegro noted that the issue is mostly caused by individuals and small businesses who see an opportunity to make some easy money. Countries like Gabon in Africa and the Phillipines host many of the servers responsible for the Copyright issues of more economically developed countries.

Paying for music with a Tweet

Pay with a Tweet is certainly for either the pre-established forward thinking businessperson or the monetarily unconcerned up-and-comer. The service is useful for musicians, journalists, authors, service providers and more. Essentially what you do is set up a download link through the site in order to set up a download link for one of your files. For example you have just spent hours on Abelton creating a new track for your DJ page. You upload the file to the internet and get a download link. You then take that download link into the Pay with a Tweet form and design a tweet to be posted on the listeners feed to promote your music. The service is making music more accessible and helping artists promote themselves online. Using a system like this can cut out middlemen and recording companies to promote live performances rather than album sales for money. This service could be the future of the music industry.

Why 4Shared is different

4Shared is a file sharing site that is very different from most others. The service has a .com URL which makes it a little more legitimate than the illegal .me or .ru sites of today. Above is an image of the companies iPhone application's icon on which you can add downloads to a registered account cue. You can also link the account to your Facebook in order to share the fact that you have just downloaded an artists song. The concept of Creative Commons Copyrighting and relies on the artists obligation to attribute the work to the original artist. 4Shared certainly plays into this by attributing downloads to original artists automatically (if allowed).

The Pirate Bay's Top 100

The Pirate Bay. The scourge of the internet. With more than 24 million peers the site is to some a black mark on the growth of the network in the 21st century. But to others the site's Top 100 page is a commonly accessed bookmark. This page gives you a menu of more that 20 different lists of the top 100 downloads in that category. From comics and e-books to porn and iphone games this list gives you the ability to choose from a buffet of illegal torrents. Today is the 26th of November and the Top 100 movie torrents include The Dark Knight Rises, Looper and Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn part 2. The Dark Knight Rises has just been released on DVD, Twilight will be released in March 2013, and Looper will be released on December 31st. The Top 100 movies give a accurate profile of the most sought after film of today and lets you download them illegally faster than you can walk to the theater to buy a ticket.

What could Online Piracy mean for video game developers?

I recently pirated the Zelda 25th Anniversary Symphony album and remembered Legend Of Zelda: Wind Waker. I took to the internet to figure out wether or not I would have to wait until reunited with my old purple Nintendo GameCube and it's silly little game disks. Luckily I found a new Nintendo Emulator called "Penguin" that allows you to open disk images with .iso endings. These files can be downloaded from EmuParadise, a files haring service with its servers located in Montenegro. I was able to download games for the Wii, Gamecube, Nintendo 64 and games for all other previous Nintendo consoles.
It took me a total of 90 minutes from inception to the start screen. Are services like this causing significant harm to these companies by freely distributing older games or is it not making much of a difference? A new Gamecube today can run you $399 and each game costs about $50. I think all the adults who grew up during the rise of video games who have gone to school and trained to enter the industry will have to deal with this issue in the future.

Blog 11 - Final Blog

  For my final blog post I just wanted to say that I have learned so much about online piracy and the implications to it. My group members have been helpful and professional throughout the whole semester. The one big thing about online piracy that I have learned is that file sharing will not stop as time goes on, no matter how big the restrictions and penalties get. We need to learn to live and grow with file sharing. Yes it does take away from peoples work, but at the same time the people who have there files being shared can make a profit with what they have made in other ways. Eg. concerts for musicians. After learning the information from what my other group members made, it was clear to me that my generation gets most of their knowledge from file sharing. If it’s from the classroom, to viewing articles, books, and movies it all seems to be just one click away. Also I learned how easy it was to get information online. Sure it is illegal but at the same time it is so simple and easy to get and everyone does it. The government can only pick certain people, who generally have no idea what they are doing with downloading half the time and end being made an example. EG. making a Minnesota mom pay 1.4 million dollars for 24 illegal song downloads. Duncan in my group also post interesting articles that have to do with online piracy laws in the United States, which I found very interesting. They showed how harsh the penalties were in the United States compared to Canada. Eric made some good points on the actual big name file sharing websites, like KIM.com and Megaupload who made millions of dollars via online sharing. In conclusion I have learned many new things about online piracy and have felt my groups articles and blog posts helped me stay up to date with recent events dealing with online piracy.      

Feds charge 7 in 'massive' case against Megaupload online piracy ring.

This article is an example of one of the biggest online piracy acts in the world. It generated over 175 million dollars. “Charged with multiple counts of racketeering, copyright infringement, and money laundering, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said in a statement.”(Keizer, 2012). The seized in the Megaupload lawsuit received up to 55 years in jail. In my opinion this is just a ridiculous case. Megaupload is a site that just is a hub for sharing information, its not like they uploaded there own files onto the site. In a couple of year I bet there will be so many of these site that the government cant do anything about it. Again it was the USA who made these lawsuits. In every article I have done for this blog, the USA is mentioned in a negative way. All the major sites we use to gather information including Goggle, and Wikipedia went ‘dark’ to protest against the government. It seems the government just doesn't know how to control online file sharing. You have to ask yourself will online piracy ever stop or will we keep seeing random acts of justice through the history of the online file sharing.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9223557/Feds_charge_7_in_massive_case_against_Megaupload_online_piracy_ring

SOPA-like Internet piracy laws could be coming to Canada

This article goes over new online piracy laws. Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is set up in the United States and warns Canadians that they will soon have to follow under this new law. In a sense it is a good forefront on protecting intellectual property the problem is that it also protects and restricts online sharing of files. One example of an online source that will be affect is Wikipedia. The site went on an ‘all black’ theme to help protest this new law. “Wikipedia's English-language front page went dark last week for 24 hours in protest over the U.S. SOPA and PIPA anti-piracy laws.”(Financial Post, 1). This law may not be actually put into society some researcher say as well. For this law to go into society major mainstream online sites would go down including YouTube and SoundCloud, along with other social media sites. In my opinion this is not the best way to terminate online piracy, they are moving to fast as people will not be able to adjust to all these restrictions right away. Would you protest against this law? I know I would they are taking away our rights to be creative even if it is online sharing that we are getting our ideas from. 

http://business.financialpost.com/2012/01/24/sopa-like-laws-could-be-coming-to-canada-expert-warns/