Digital Piracy
Digital piracy is
attacking and robbing the data which is transformed into electronic format. It
is the unethical theft and selling of copyrighted materials like music, video,
computer software, etc to unauthorized sellers. In accordance to increased demand
for pirated goods, people who are involved in digital piracy always get a good
income that causes it to grow rapidly. They do not have to pay royalty to the
original owners of the digital content. Moreover, most of the pirated products
are very easy to be found as compared with the original one.
1 June 1999 was the day on which Digital
piracy was started by Shawn Fanning who was a student from North-Eastern
University in Boston. He created anew peer to peer (P2P) software Napster which
allows users to share or exchange files of any digital content with other users. Anyhow,
Napster didn’t stay for a long time and in 2001 it was forced to be shut down
as an order from Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), as Napster
had influenced people to download files from internet without limitations.
Regardless its shut, most people started to use other files sharing like Bit
Torrent and Lime Wire.
LAW OF DIGITAL
PIRACY
To reduce the
activities of digital piracy, Copyright law has been enacted with it.
Fundamental cause of the law is to protect the rights of the owners such as
author and artist of digital content from being pirated. As a result, if someone
copies or downloads any type of digital content then they can be punished under
Copyright Act 1987.
Who’s Guilty?
Many of us are guilty
of piracy. If we have downloaded and shared games, movies, computer software
etc, without paying or obtaining permission from the creator, then we are
guilty of piracy.
CONCLUSION
Just like mushrooms gets spread in rain the same way digital piracy is being spread. The main motivator of digital piracy is that people are getting a lot of profit. But in contrast, it can make adverse impact on the owner of the digital content as their ideas and goods have been pirated. Moreover, we should also remember that this activity is illegal and people who practice it are punished whenever they are caught. So, it is advised not to get involved with digital piracy and always buy the original digital contents. Although it is costly but it will give a great amount of satisfaction of not doing any unethical and illegal activity and also will get original digital contents of high quality.
Deepanshu Ramani
BCA- II (E)
