Increasing piracy

Description

Piracy causes huge losses for owners of software, music and other property. According to a study of the Business Software Alliance, in 2003, losses due to pirated software (thus, only software, not the other properties) were $29 billion, 36% of all software is pirated. And in 2004 and 2005 this amount has only been growing and will keep growing in the future. With the emerging technology (maybe Web 2.0), piracy will be easier because of open standards; that is why this is an emerging problem for our topic. In the future, Intellectual Property laws has to decrease the amount,the easiness and the temptation of piracy.

Enablers

1. State of the technology: peer to peer sharing, do not need to buy software of music, just download it from someone that put his softare online via peer to peer sharing. Technological developments have made it cheaper and easier to make copies of information. Printing was a great advance: it eliminated the need for hand copying of documents. Photocopying and computers have made it even easier to make copies of written documents. Photography and sound recordings have done the same for visual and audio material. The ability to protect intellectual property is being undermined by technology. Yet there is a strong push to expand the scope of ownership of information.
2. Inflation, decreasing economy:music becomes luxury,more and more expensive-> increasing temptation to piracy
3. Everyone is doing it, almost impossible to track down the pirates and punish them
4. Booming of the internet industry:[1]
5. Casey or Sandhya, smth about peoples need to share info

Inhibitors

1. Legacy systems and copyright laws
2. Awareness of the destuctiveness, losses and unfairness of piracy : if piracy continues to keep in this way, software or music or developers of any other art will not be motivated anymore to keep on doing their good work, because afterwords, their work is being "distributed" without their permission (=piracy), as if it is not their own work.
3. War against piracy : for example Software Piracy Protection from Microsoft (see references).

Paradigms

Increasing piracy means that the intellectual property of someone, the hard work of someone can be given free to others; this will leave the owner of the intellectual property (software, song, book etc.) unmotivated.
That is why; if piracy keeps increasing the excellent work of scientists, authors, singers and others will ultimately diminish. Those excellent people will get the feeling as if their work is not appreciated anymore, because they have no control over distributing it; it is distributed by piracy, without their permission. Thus, on the one hand piracy will change this world into a world with less good work, because the smart and talented people are not motivated anymore in distributing their knowledge or art. Also businesses may diminish because they will be not profitable anymore because of piracy.
On the other hand, increased piracy will lead into a world of increased knowledge and art sharing.

Timing

According to the writers of the article on[2] "The roots of software piracy may lie in the early 1960s, when computer programs were freely distributed with mainframe hardware by hardware manufacturers (e.g. AT&T, Chase Manhattan Bank, General Electric and General Motors)".
Piracy will continue to grow; it will grow less fast than in the past years, but still it will keep on growing.

Ashwina: I think it will grow even faster because of the technology available now that makes piracy possible and easy nowadays (think of the different download/ripper programs)

References

1. http://www.uni.uiuc.edu/~dstone/piracy.htm
2.http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/story/0,10801,94364,00.html?from=story_picks
3. http://www.microsoft.com/piracy/activation_how.mspx
4. http://www.siia.net/piracy/
5. http://www.bsa.org/usa/antipiracy/