Internet Piracy: Theft of Intellectual Property Essay -- Copyright Vio

Piracy is a form of theft. Specifically, it refers to the unauthorized copy or use of intellectual post. Intellectual property is knowledge or expression that is owned by someone. There argon three major types of intellectual property 1) creative works, including music, written material, movies, and softw atomic number 18, which are protect by procure rectitude 2) inventions, which are protected by patent law and 3) brand-name products, which are protected by trademarks. Many of the issues surrounding buccaneering collect to do with the difference between intellectual property and physical property. A CD, for example, is a piece of physical property, but the songs on the CD are intellectual property. A customer in a record memory board can purchase a CD, but someone else still owns, or more precisely, has the copyright to the songs on the CD. Piracy is primarily a difficulty for the entertainment and software industries, and therefore piracy most often involves violations of copyright law. Copyright is a legal right that protects creative works from existence reproduced, performed, or disseminated without permission of the copyright owner. Essentially, a copyright gives its owner the scoop shovel right to make copies of the material in question. Physical piracy-the copying and mislabeled sale of hard-copy CDs, videotapes, and DVDs-costs the music industry over $4 billion a year worldwide and the movie industry more than $3.5 billion. These numbers do not factor in the growing (and difficult to measure) problem of earnings piracy, in which music and movies are transferred to digital format and copies are do of the resulting computer file. Journalist Charles C. Mann explains why Internet piracy has the potential to be vastly more damaging to copyright industr... ...ples physical property, there is distinctly a social benefit from the wide dissemination of intellectual propertyi.e., ideas and their expressions.In Naughtons view, online file sharin g does not qualify as piracy at all We have to remind legislators that intellectual property rights are a socially-conferred privilege rather than an inalienable right, that copying is not incessantly evil (and in some cases is actually socially beneficial) and that there is a huge difference between wholesale piracythe mass-production and sale of illegal copies of protected worksand the filesharing that most internet users go in for.Although online file sharing debuted in 1999, lawmakers and copyright industries are just beginning to address the unnumberable questions the practice has generated. In At Issue Internet Piracy, authors attempt to wait on some of those questions.