Subscribe to Dollars & Sense magazine. Recent articles related to the financial crisis. Nice Analysis of Complexities of Online PiracyFrom The Financial Times:Pirates on parade By Salamander Davoudi and Tim Bradshaw Fiancial Times Published: July 22 2009 03:00 | Last updated: July 22 2009 03:00 In April, when a Swedish court sentenced the founders of Pirate Bay to one-year prison terms for promoting copyright infringement on the world's largest filesharing website, the music and film industries gave a standing ovation. But their triumph was short-lived. The four men, who "tweeted" vigorously on Twitter during their trial, may not be able to communicate so freely from their prison cells. But their struggle for internet freedoms has developed into a political issue: Sweden's Pirate party , dedicated to the legalisation of file-sharing, won a seat last month in the European parliament. The war being waged by the entertainment industry against online piracy was further weakened when its powerful ally and champion of internet policing, Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France, had his anti-piracy bill watered down by his country's highest court in April. Ten years after the launch of Napster, the first online file-sharing service, the music industry is no closer to solving the problems created by digital piracy. As advances in technology make television, film and video games companies more vulnerable to piracy, that decade-long failure to change consumer behaviour threatens to undermine business models across the media industry. Piracy has helped to create momentum around legal and intellectual challenges to copyright law. "Piracy has gone from being a simple argument about infringement or using something without permission to questioning the very basis of copyright," says Gregor Pryor, a digital media partner at Reed Smith, the international law firm. Read the rest of the article Labels: filesharing, intellectual property, internet piracy, media industry, technology
Comments:
It's a nice article, aside from using the term "stealing" without ironic quotation marks.
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But as far as I'm concerned, there aren't any complexities. Anything that prevents me from using a CD I paid for on whatever platform I choose, or sharing it with whomever I choose, or restricts what I can do with my own pen, paper, or hard drive, is violating my property rights. So-called "intellectual property" is theft, plain and simple. << Home |