Sunday, February 25, 2007

Illegal Film Pirating: Who’s Really Getting Hurt?

As children, we learn that it is wrong to steal. Thus as adults we’re expected to respect the property of others and suffer the consequences when we do not. With little or no exceptions to this rule, the number of people who are illegally pirating music and movies over the internet is shocking. The success of the file sharing site, Napster, created a community in which multimedia files could be shared, saved and burned to disc without any royalties being paid to the artists or production companies. Though eventually Napster was forced to charge each visitor a small fee per song, irreparable damage was done. Today CD’s and movies are appearing on the internet and made available to the public, often times even before their official release date. In retaliation, many production companies and artists have filed lawsuits against downloader’s. But many people find this unfair, especially considering the inflated prices consumers are being asked to pay. With this in mind, I’ve again decided to look at two other blogs discussing this issue and comment on their thoughts. The first post I looked at, “Less Than 5% Download Movies Legal or Not” comes from The Movie Blog maintained by John Campea. The second post, “New Study Shows Extremely Low Percentage of Movie Downloading,” came from a blog by Monika Bartyzel called Cinematical.

“Less Than 5% Download Movies Legal or Not”
Comment:
Upon reading your post, I can certainly understand your frustration with the entertainment industry. Why do production companies feel it is necessary to force consumers who are trying to abide by copyright laws to pay extra fees, just so they can play their purchases on their device of choice? It seems logical that if someone is going to illegally download, they’re not going to attempt to transfer it over to another device such as an IPod pictured on the right. I support copyright laws, and I sympathize with the concept of giving an artist credit for his or her work. Unfortunately, rather than discovering new ways to stop illegal movie and music downloading, companies seems to be passing the added cost onto legitimate consumers. This IPod scandal is simply more proof of that. If someone legally purchases both an IPod and a DVD, why in the world should they have to spend any more money to get said DVD onto said IPod? And what is particularly frustrating is taking into consideration that while the law-abiding faction of society is shelling out more and more money, there are illegal downloader’s out there; and they probably have to cope with less red tape than the rest of us. That being said, I can also understand the point view of production companies. While it may be a pain and completely unfair, the reason for the added burden on consumers is owing to the few illegal downloader’s out there, who aren’t willing to abide by the same laws that the rest of the world are. It is the few who are ruining it for the many!

New Study Shows Extremely Low Percentage of Movie Downloading
Comment:
After reading your post, there are certainly a number of valid points in your argument. The most important of which being the misrepresentation of how widespread illegal pirating is. Considering the amount of public service announcements, such as the one on the left, and federal warnings consumers are bombarded with every time they purchase a DVD or go to a movie, one would expect huge percentages of illegal downloader’s, but certainly not a mere 5%. However, upon viewing the ABI research study using the link provided on your post, I noted that researchers only questioned people eighteen years and older. This is somewhat misleading considering that a large majority of illegal downloader are eighteen years old or younger. Thus, the controversy of some parents being sued by production companies, for the actions of their children. While there is no doubt the extent of this problem is over exaggerated, how exactly should the film and music industries respond? If they take no action, the problem will only increase, and while the precautions may not have eliminated the existing pirated material they certainly have stopped the production of any new footage.

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