Online Piracy Essay

Online Piracy

Online piracy is a common activity amongst Americans. Music, films, shows, software, and games are taken from the internet at no cost. However, when one is caught, they are to pay outrageous amounts of money. Online piracy shouldn’t be a mean for prosecution. It doesn’t affect sales all that much and it’s more convenient to pirate.

According to a report by the Institute of Prospective Technological Studies, “digital music piracy does not displace legal music purchases in the digital format.” This means that downloading music for free isn’t an alternative for legally buying music. The study shows that most of the music downloaded wouldn’t have been bought if illegal downloading websites weren’t available. Another point brought up is that users who pirate music are also more likely to buy music. Those users that do not buy much music also do not pirate much.

There are many people who find it more convenient to pirate. A survey, conducted by market research firm CoreData, found that people would pay for their TV shows if there were cheap and legal platforms as easy to navigate as some of the illegal ones. President of the Pirate Party Australia political group, David Crafti, believes it all comes down to freedom. Crafti states, “They just want to know that they’ve got the data, they can watch it whenever they want, on whatever device they want, they can watch it in three months or a year later, and not have any limitations.”

Some people believe that pirating is stealing an artist’s hard earned money. They put time and effort into producing that and people are getting it for free. The study by the IPTS showed that illegal music consumption could stimulate legal music consumption. By sampling one song, they may be inclined to buy more songs by the same artist. It is suggested that for every 10% increase