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Piracy and the Internet Essay

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In the late 1990s, most homes and organizations began to receive Internet access. In correlation, many features became available to Web including the fact that files of any type could be downloaded with ease from any source quickly and often for free. The film and music industries felt that the availability of the Internet was posing a large threat to their business model. It was so easy to obtain a song or even an entire movie clip with a click of a mouse. Software and books could be had for “free” as well. It was a common misconception then that these files were available for the taking without needing to pay for it and also without any worry of penalty. In turn, many otherwise “innocent” individuals would obtain this copyrighted …show more content…

These three areas will be the topic of this paper. I.SOFTWARE PIRACY Since the inception of the personal computer, piracy and software has been a problem faced by many software publishers. In the early days of the modern computer, virtually all computers had a floppy drive, and program's executable and library files were seamlessly transferred from the hard drive or the software diskette to a blank floppy disk. Friends and colleagues would then get access to the costly software free-of-charge, or worse, multiple copies would be made of that program to later be sold for a fraction of the retail price, with the publisher seeing none of the money. It was already becoming a problem in the early 1990s, that the Software Publishers Alliance had produced a promotional video, Don't Copy That Floppy, to spread awareness of the implications pertaining to pirating software. A similar promotional video, Don't Copy That 2, was released in 2008 as a reminder, mainly targeting the younger generation and college students. Today, physical copies are still of concern, but the digital copies have many software publishers concerned. As software can cost anywhere from $20 to $2000 or even more, it really adds up quickly as lost profit potential, and digital copies—copies on the Internet—are being made widely available. Many software products contain copy protection, however, many protection methods have been broken. i.How do pirates obtain

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