piracy.

PIRACY.

Stop and think.

Have you ever had the tiniest thought of sharing your files through the peer-to-peer (P2P) application or posting your files up on a forum for free public access. If the answer is no, you would probably have thought of downloading a movie/song without paying for it via P2P applications. It has become a common knowledge that piracy is a form of crime though it requires no literal harmful weapons. Illegal downloading and sharing is equivalent to walking out of a shop with the unpaid good. It rips off the victim’s intellectual property and directly affects the individual greatly.

However, majority overlook the consequences of piracy and neglects copyright law. Many may feel that piracy is a low-risk crime so they will never be caught red-handed. Governments have been looking into this problem though, zooming in to internet thieves to reduce the crime rate and protecting creativity.

The affected individual may feel unrecognised and pointless to continue with what he / she was doing because it will eventually turn out to be the number 1 on the most illegally downloaded stuff on the internet. It has deprived people to explore their creativity as people are able to have ‘free accesses’ to it. The drive and determination is gradually diminishing in people.

Indeed, advancement in technology bears a part of blame. Though it serves to provide mass with EASY access, it overlooked the FREE access part. It is convenient to people who have no spare time to get the albums or DVDs, yet it is equally convenient to people who tries to be thrifty by downloading it illegally.

Even though the government is trying to lay out fines for people who overlook piracy, the number of people doing it is seemingly still not decreasing. The user knows that by using the P2P devices, it is directly exposing his computer to harmful viruses. Yet, people are still doing it because they see the advantages as the larger benefit. It is very important to keep down the crime rate so as to protect creativity and encourage more people to produce their original products rather than infringing it.