Reasearch: Why Everyone Should Care About Piracy

Why You Should Care About Downloading Pirate Software, Movies and Music

The Internet is digital. So are all the movies, audio files and images on it. One of the features of digital music, movies and digital software is that it can be copied quickly, cheaply, and perfectly, and copies can whizz around the Internet to be traded by people anywhere in the world. There is so much of it out there in cyberspace, that sooner or later you are bound to be offered some, or will have the opportunity to download some. So why should you be concerned?

Worldwide financial losses from piracy are huge: $13 billion lost per year by the computer software industry; $2.5 billion lost per year by the movie industry, and $4.1 billion per year lost by the music industry. Piracy on this scale has certainly been helped by the advent of the Internet. Now anyone anywhere in the world can connect up to a foreign or domestic Website and download free software, movies or music which has been stolen by someone else. Piracy is fast, cheap and often anonymous. The net result of these huge losses of $20 billion a year is twofold. Firstly, software, movies and music all cost more to the people who pay for it, because the industry tries to recoup its losses by raising prices. So we, that is you and me, the law abiding people pay the price for the activities of pirates.

http://www.safetyed.org/help/pirate.html