Electronic Piracy and Digital Media - Term Paper Example

With the emergence of that most students having broadband and easier access, e-piracy became a social issue with the download of videos and music. Illegal use of material with copyrights is not a new process as a whole. Sharing of peer-to-peer files became prominent in 1999. Napster with more than 20 million users was a popular company and used file-swapping technology. In 2002, concerns over unauthorized digital file sharing over the internet enforced the Federal Communication Commission for devising laws to prevent e-Piracy (Halfteck, 2006).

E-books are accessed and purchased online and consumers’ financial and personal information travels over the internet. The legal issue for e-books is the copy protection of privacy. Can (2011) reports that e-books of the top 10 best-selling companies are downloaded 80,000 times in a year throughout the world.
In China, software piracy has exceeded than 80%, and IT professionals do not practice ethically in many organizations. Microsoft won the $320,000 in a court over the illegal use of 450 copies for the 9 different programs against Dazhong Insurance a Shanghai-based company. Information Technology users also commit the piracy of software. A common violation takes place when companies’ employees take a copy of the software for computers at home (Reynolds 2012).

NetNames in an investigation found that more than 76% of title books were available for downloading in a pirated form. In addition to this, it was also reported that most of the students downloaded pirated copies of five major discipline textbooks. Educational books are too expensive that every student cannot afford to buy them from the concerned company (Izundu, 2013). In Germany, about 60% of electronic books are downloaded illegally and the market share remains below 1%. People always look for pirated e-book content as they do not need to make corporate accounts. The arrival of Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s IPad in the British market, illegal downloading of e-books has spiked among women for more than 35 years. Regardless of gender and age, e-book readers used the illegal downloading of e-books without paying for these e-books. Read More