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
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

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).