User:IntrigueBlue/Piracy (information)

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Please note that this article is a draft, containing some information copied from copyright infringement and other articles, as well as information which lies beyond the scope of the original article. Feel free to add and refine content as appropriate.

Piracy refers to the unauthorized reproduction of copyrighted information. It can refer to the illicit copying of information onto physical media, the illicit transfer of digital computer files, or to illicit broadcasting. Piracy violates intellectual property rights, generally constitutes copyright infringement, patent infringement, and/or trademark infringement, and interferes with the sale of legitimate items and the receipt of royalties or residuals by the copyright owners. Bootlegging is often used as a euphemism for piracy, although it has different meanings in different contexts.

Some groups, including the Free Software Foundation, object that "piracy" is a loaded word, and that the label creates a prejudice that is used to gain political ground.[1]

Publishers often refer to prohibited copying as "piracy." In this way, they imply that illegal copying is ethically equivalent to attacking ships on the high seas, kidnapping and murdering the people on them.
If you don't believe that illegal copying is just like kidnapping and murder, you might prefer not to use the word "piracy" to describe it. Neutral terms such as "prohibited copying" or "unauthorized copying" are available for use instead. Some of us might even prefer to use a positive term such as "sharing information with your neighbor."

On the other hand, many self-proclaimed "pirates" take pride in the term, in light of the romanticised Hollywood portrayal of piracy and sometimes jokingly using "pirate talk" in their conversations.

Contents

[edit] Methods

The physical sale of pirated material was common in the past, but in the late 1990s and 2000s widespread distribution of copyrighted material was facilitated by three factors:

  1. the rise of standard computer file formats and data compression algorithms for audio, video and other files,
  2. the ability to share files between computers via bulletin board systems, e-mail, FTP, instant messaging, internet forums, peer-to-peer file sharing networks and darknets
  3. the increased availability of broadband Internet access in developed countries, reducing download times and increasing acceptable file sizes for data transfers.

[edit] Text

Text information, such as books, magazines and journals may be pirated by photocopying, optical character recognition, image scanning, or otherwise reproducing text.

The ease of copying text and graphics from Internet websites led many traditional publishers to be wary of allowing anything in which they had a copyright interest to be published online. E-book formats which prevent text copying are intended to prevent such piracy or plagiarism. This issue may also have contributed to the popularity of corporate websites built with graphics rather than text, or in Adobe Flash, which makes it more difficult to perform copy and paste operations on the content.

In website design, the text of markup languages, stylesheet languages and scripting languages (such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP) can be copied as simply as other text, allowing the design and structure of a successful website to be easily plagiarised. Thus various forms of encryption and obfuscation have been developed to protect proprietary web designs.

[edit] Music and movies

Main article: Copyright infringement of audio-visual works

While any copyrighted material that can be represented in digital form can be pirated online, the majority of downloaded material consists of music and movies.

Music and other audio information can be reproduced by dubbing (transferring) information to any one of the numerous physical audio storage media, including audio cassettes, compact discs and so on. Live performances can be captured with sound recording equipment smuggled into a concert.

Video media can be dubbed onto physical video storage media such as videotapes, DVDs, or VCDs. While it is possible to digitize analog media such as videotapes, most pirated material online is ripped from DVDs and VCDs. Films still in theatres (or even unreleased films) for which consumer DVDs are unavailable may be duplicated from screener DVDs, or lower-quality telesync recordings, or "cam" recordings made with a video recording device smuggled into a movie theatre or other closed performance or presentation.

[edit] Software

Main articles: Copyright infringement of software and warez

Computer software and computer and video games can be pirated by copying the necessary files to another hard disk or other computer storage media, or by transmitting them over computer networks.

[edit] Broadcasts

Broadcast piracy is the illegal airing of bootlegged films, or legitimate films where the broadcast rights have not been paid for. Pirate decryption, or signal theft, is the illegal tapping of cable television, satellite television or satellite radio signals intended for a media service's paying customers. [2]

Pirate radio stations circumvent national broadcasting regulations, either by the unlicensed use of radio airwaves, or by the broadcast of copyrighted material without the payment of royalties.

[edit] Counterfeiting and bootlegging

A counterfeit is an imitation item that is made with the intent to deceptively represent its content or origins. Counterfeiters attempt to deceive the consumer into thinking they are purchasing a legitimate item, or convince the consumer that they could deceive others with the imitation. Thus a counterfeit is always a pirate, but a pirate is not necessarily a counterfeit.

A copy which doesn't attempt to deceive, such as software without a cover, a compact disc with newly created or amateur cover art, or a new compilation of a performer's previously released songs, is often referred to as a "bootleg" instead.

[edit] Sales of counterfeit materials

Main article: Counterfeit

Counterfeit goods, particularly music CDs and movies on DVD, are commonly sold by street vendors in some large urban centres. Pasar malam (night markets) in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia are well known for this. These vendors may have to pack up and leave at a moment's notice if approached by those who enforce copyright law.

The RIAA alledges that sales of counterfeit material is used to fund organized crime and international terrorist networks.[3]

[edit] Bootleg recording

Main article: Bootleg recording

Some music enthusiasts use the term "bootleg" to differentiate otherwise unavailable recordings from pirated material. In this context, "bootlegging" is trafficking in recordings that the record companies have not commercially released—such as demos, alternate takes or live concert recordings—whereas "piracy" is the illegal copying/sale of recordings that are available commercially, or are planned/scheduled for commercial release. However, bootleg recordings are still protected by copyright despite their lack of formal release, and their distribution is still against the law.

"Bootlegging" can be used as a euphemism for piracy when referring to the unlicensed file sharing of copyrighted music and movies. In the same vein, it has become the default term amongst anime fans to describe the piracy or counterfeiting of CDs, DVDs, games, and other merchandise. These increasingly sophisticated imitation goods from Hong Kong are much reviled by fans and the industry alike, and many anime fan conventions have adopted a strict non-bootleg policy for vendors and attendees.

[edit] Copyright law and international treaties

Main article: History of copyright law

Before the 1700s, the only copyright laws were typically stationer's copyrights, by which publishers would collude to avoid lowering prices through competition, and tools of state censorship.

The Statute of Anne of 1709 is considered to be the first modern copyright law.

Intellectual property (IP) laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, such that the acquisition, registration or enforcement of IP rights must be pursued or obtained separately in each territory of interest. However, these laws are becoming increasingly harmonised through the effects of international treaties, beginning with the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, which has protected the international copyrights on literary, scientific, and artistic works since 1886.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) was founded in 1967 as a specialized agency of the United Nations, to facilitate the international protection of IP rights.

The 1984 "Betamax case" in the United States, more formally known as Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., established that that copying technologies are not inherently illegal, if substantial non-infringing use can be made of them.

In the 1990s, technological advances that facilitated widespread copyright infringement within and between countries spurred serious work on international copyright treaties. In 1994 the member countries of the World Trade Organization (WTO) signed the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) to set down minimum standards for most forms of IP regulation. In 1996, the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty and the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty went into force. This was enacted in the United States through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (1998), and in Europe through the European Union Copyright Directive (2001).

Further United States laws affecting piracy include the No Electronic Theft Act (1997) and the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act (2005).

[edit] Copyright infringement

Main article: Copyright infringement
Sort out a little later what should remain in the CI article, then do a short summary here; it looks like most of the legal stuff - legal definitions, penalties, etc should go there, while the methods, history, and justifications should go here.

[edit] History of information piracy

This section seems to be unnaturally long, with no logical sections that can be split off. Maybe a seperate article on the history of piracy is in order?

[edit] Origins of piracy

Unauthorized copying was not an issue before the invention of the printing press and movable type in the 1400s, as producing a copy was just as expensive as producing an original. The profitability of mass reproduction, however, tempted many printers and publishers to create competing editions of popular works.

The analogy between infringement of intellectual property and piracy predates the existance of laws prohibiting such acts. According the the Oxford English Dictionary, the first instance of the word's use was in 1603, when Thomas Dekker wrote in his Wonderfull Yeare, "Banish these Word-pirates (you sacred mistresses of learning) into the gulfe of Barbarisme." He was referring to publishers who printed and sold duplicates of others' works, thus making a profit without needing to pay royalties to the author. Another reference was made by Alfred Tennyson in the preface to his poem "The Lover's Tale" in 1879, where he mentions that sections of this work "have of late been mercilessly pirated".

[edit] 20th century piracy

Piracy of music and movies was less common in the days of celluloid movies and reel-to-reel audio tape recording, as the facilities for the duplication of such media were uncommon and expensive. The advent of the 8-track cartridge format in 1964 increased music piracy, with many cartridge labels spuriously claiming that "all royalties have been paid."

Arguably, the widespread social acceptance of piracy on an individual basis can be linked to the development of the MP3 compression codec for digital audio encoding, which first became common on the Internet in 1995. The relatively small file sizes, coupled with the emerging popularity of high-speed internet, made the promise of convenient, free access to music a tantalizing lure for many.

[edit] 21st century piracy

The first peer to peer file sharing network was Napster, launched in June of 1999. The music industry was quick to react to the widespread copyright infringement on the network, but their first lawsuit, filed in December of 1999, only served to publicize the service. It was eventually forced to shut down in 2001 and pay millions of dollars in damages, and its name and logos were later acquired by the recording industry's own Pressplay service.

Napster was a centralized company that was vulnerable to legal action, and file-sharers were quick to learn from their misfortune. While it had been billed as a peer-to-peer system, files were in fact hosted on a central server, making the network vulnerable to shutdown. Even before the Napster lawsuits, a new generation of file-sharing applications was appearing. The FastTrack protocol (used by Kazaa, Grokster and other clients), introduced in March 2001, used some computers in the network as "supernodes", while the open-source Gnutella (used by LimeWire, Morpheus and more) is a fully distributed network. These networks had theoretically higher maximum speeds, and enjoyed the legal loophole wherein no copyright material was stored on centralized servers, thus providing a degree of protection against legal action.

The unlawful downloading and sharing of recorded music in the form of MP3 and other small, lossy audio files is still widespread, even after the demise of Napster and a series of infringement suits brought by the American recording industry against music-sharing individuals, seemingly chosen at random. The crackdown has spurred the development of anonymous peer-to-peer and friend-to-friend networks, which reduce the amount of personally identifiable data available to investigators.

The introduction of video codecs such as DivX (1998), and later H.264 (2005), created the potential to share movies in the same way that music had been shared in the past. These codecs allowed films to be compressed to a reasonable 600-700 MB without a significant degradation in quality from source data on single- or even double-layer DVDs. However, files of these size were excruciatingly slow to download, even on the new generation of file sharing applications. This demand for fast access to movies may have significantly contributed to the widespread acceptance of the BitTorrent distributed peer-to-peer protocol following its 2002 launch.

Later versions of the protocol allowed files to be shared without the assistance of a centralized BitTorrent tracker, but even those that were centrally tracked enjoyed the legal loophole wherein a torrent file contains only a description of potentially copyrighted material, not the material itself, making it less susceptible to prosecution.

Most movies seeded onto torrent networks were simply ripped from commercial DVDs, but the demand for titles not yet released to the home video market led to the exploitation of promotional screener DVDs distributed by movie studios (often for consideration for awards), as well as low-quality camming within movie theaters. The Motion Picture Association of America has attempted to restrict both.

On April 28, 2003, Apple Computer introduced the iTunes Store (then "iTunes Music Store") in order to sell legimately downloadable music, which become surprisingly popular compared to other authorized music sales sites, now enjoying an 80% market share among online music stores. No concrete statistics exist concerning the impact that the advent of viable online music sales had on the popularity of music piracy, but it undoubtedly had some effect. As of September 2006, the store had sold over 1.5 billion songs.

The BitTorrent trackers' theory of inculpability lasted until the fall of 2004, (date would be good) when increasing police and legal pressure led to the eventual closure of the torrent sites Suprnova.org and LokiTorrent. As of 2006, Swedish BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay claims to be the world's largest; so far there have been no legal moves against them, but representatives of major copyright holders are now lobbying for changes in copyright law that would remove the loopholes preventing the continued prosecution of operating Bittorrent trackers.

Add eDonkey history


move to history or copyright infringement section?

Sharing copied music is legal in many countries, such as Canada, and parts of Europe, provided that this information is neither advertised, nor that the songs be sold.

[edit] Individual justification

While some individuals are simply attracted by the idea of a free lunch and would have no moral problem with the theft of physical material, the widespread nature of information piracy cannot be fully explained in this way. [Statistic needed] Most pirates would have qualms about committing an act of outright theft, and a number of arguments have been used to distance piracy from theft.

First, the cost of individual download of pirated material is not immediately apparant. When a music CD is stolen from a store, the perpetrator generally knows that the CD had a cost associated with its manufacture and shipping; as such, the theft has a tangible cost to the store. However, neglecting the price of bandwidth, information has no innate cost. Following this reasoning, there is no economic difference between downloading an album, and choosing not to buy it. A difference does appear when an individual who would otherwise have bought a CD chooses instead to download it, but even so, the choice has no calculable impact on the record company: the album still sits on the store shelf, and the potential for profit from that particular copy still exists. Because of this reasoning, it is possible to draw an ethical distinction between theft and piracy.

Another school of thought is that piracy is ethically acceptable, so long as it is used to reinforce purchasing decisions, rather than replace them. By this thought, a user might download a number of albums before deciding on one to purchase. Depending on the individual, they may then make the decision to delete other, less preferred music - or decide that the purchase of an album most suited to their musical tastes is enough contribution to compensate for the loss incurred by the other downloaded albums.

Conversely, others may choose to download only a piece of software that they would otherwise be unable to afford. However, this decision has the potential result of reducing sales of other, less expensive products that might otherwise have been purchased instead.

Critics of the use of "software piracy" to describe such practices contend that it unfairly compares a crime that makes no victim - except for those that would have profited from hypothetically lost sales - to the violent actions of organized thieves and murderers; it also confuses mere illegal copying of material with the intentional and malicious penetration of computer systems to which one does not legally have access. As a consequence, "software piracy" is a somewhat loaded term. "Theft" or "stealing" are considered even more inflammatory, as well as legally misleading.

Some believed that the quality of new albums had decreased by the mid-1990s, with the typical bestselling album containing only one or two good songs bundled with many low-quality "filler" songs. Additionally, the price per track had greatly increased as an increase in the overall price of CDs was coupled with a decrease in the number of tracks included with each CD. People praised Napster because it enabled them to obtain hit songs without having to buy an entire album. Napster also made it relatively easy for music enthusiasts to download copies of songs that were otherwise difficult to obtain, like older songs, unreleased recordings, and songs from concert bootleg recordings. Some users felt justified in downloading digital copies of recordings they had already purchased in other formats, like LP and cassette tape, before the compact disc emerged as the dominant format for music recordings.

[edit] Corporate response

Main article: Anti-piracy
detailed info should go in Anti-piracy; this article should just have a brief summary.

Copyright holders and pro-copyright organisations commonly release statistics showing their losses due to copyright infringement in an attempt to deter the activity. For example, the MPAA estimates the global cost of the unauthorised copying of films in 2002 to be $3.5 billion.[4] Many, including some engaged in copyright infringement, have been critical of these figures, arguing that it is unreasonable to assume that every download of a film represents a lost movie ticket or DVD purchase: a person who downloads a film may not necessarily have gone to the theater or have purchased a DVD had the download not been available. Furthermore, there are instances of films benefiting from the exposure, particularly independent and cult films.

Copyright advocates point to an economic argument called the free rider problem to explain the moral downside to copyright infringement. This argument is usually used by economists to describe the disadvantage of voluntary collective action because even when use of a product has no cost to the companies associated with its production as theft does, it is claimed that the lack of financial contribution from the person infringing the copyright reduces the company's incentive to continue development.

[edit] Solutions

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Free Software Foundation: Some Confusing or Loaded Words and Phrases that are Worth Avoiding
  2. ^ http://www.respectcopyrights.org/
  3. ^ RIAA: Pirated CDs More Sophisticated, Tied To Organized Crime. Accessed September 26, 2006.
  4. ^ In this document, the MPAA claims the annual cost of copyright infringement to the US entertainment industry is $3.5 billion, but later assigns the same value to the global cost estimated in 2002.
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