Advanced technology brought convenience and efficiency to people. However, it also created a serious concern such as digital piracy. Digital piracy, defined by Cronan and Al-Rafee, is “the illegal copying/downloading of copyrighted software and media files” (as cited in Robertson, et al., 2012, p.1), which results in severe losses to the economy. The problems created by illegal downloading and digital piracy are increasing rapidly and causing more losses to be made. Therefore, illegal downloading should be banned by law with strong punishments. Illegal downloading sites should not be allowed because they destroy the industry, increase the losses in the economy, and act as a form of stealing.
Firstly, illegal downloading should be banned since…show more content… As illegal downloading causes huge losses in the music industry, it leads to another huge financial loss in the economy. For instance, illegal downloading eliminates the jobs and increases the unemployment rate. According to the Go-gulf.com, online piracy caused 71,060 jobs to be lost in the United States every year. According to the report, Stephen E. Siwek stated, “of this amount, 26,860 jobs would have been added in the sound recording industry or in downstream retail industries, while 44,200 jobs would have been added in other U.S. industries” (2007, para. 6). Furthermore, $2.7 billion per year is lost in workers’ salaries (“Online piracy in numbers”, 2011). Also across Europe, illegal downloading generates more numbers of jobs vanished and economic losses. In 2008, illegal downloading cost Britain 39,000 jobs and retail losses of £1.4 billion (“Illegal downloading ‘cost £1.4bn’”, 2010). The report done by the International Federation of the Phonogram Industry (IFPI) alleges the information on actual sales of music in the form of physical and digital and how it was affected by online and physical piracy. In this report, in 2005, 1.398 billion units were not sold due to physical piracy. If these units were able to be sold at the market price, the global industry could have produced an additional $6.460 billion (as cited in Siwek, 2007). Illegal downloading…show more content… Copyright law is a form of property ownership for the authors of creative works to have control and gain profit from the use of their works (Moser, et al., 2012). Thus, if others desire to use the author’s work that is under copyright, they should attain the author’s permission. If not, it is against the copyright law. Redistributing, copying media and selling copied versions are not the only actions against the copyright law. According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), many different actions such as downloading unauthorized versions of copyrighted music from the Internet are considered as piracy or music theft (“About Piracy”, n.d.). Also, when people download a media from the Internet, people are excluding themselves from paying the fee that everyone is required to pay. Even if a person does not cause any direct harm to the authors or the industry by downloading media illegally as other types of theft do, it is still considered as stealing and against the copyright law since it infringes on the author’s right and affects the profit