Digital Piracy

Digital piracy is a form of cybercrime encompassing the illegal copying of digital media such as computer software, digital sound recordings, and digital video recordings without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. This is a form of theft based on the monetary value of the intellectual property acquired without payment. The financial losses stemming from digital piracy are quite high and vary across studies and the type of materials pirated. It is argued that piracy causes billions of dollars in losses for [Page 204]corporations and the loss of millions in taxes that would otherwise have been paid through the purchase of a product. In addition, piracy affects jobs and employment opportunities across various fields due to concerns over the safety of intellectual property and the overall dollar loss to each company. Piracy is a global phenomenon, with participants of all age-groups across the world. In fact, the rates of piracy are thought to be highest in Asia, particularly China and India, and the Middle East, where these materials can be purchased in the black market or downloaded online.

The theft of music and video recordings existed prior to the emergence of the Internet. The development of affordable audio and video recording equipment enabled individuals to easily record music or videos during radio and television broadcasts. For example, multiple devices facilitated the duplication of video and tape cassette recordings. The development of the MP3 and compact disc formats simplified the creation of such duplicates and made piracy a tremendously simple form of crime, with immediate gratification and minimal risk. Similarly, the emergence of file-sharing programs and video-sharing sites like YouTube have made it easier for individuals to trade materials online. Finally, there is limited evidence that the development of small, highly portable MP3 players, like iPods, with tremendous storage capacity fosters piracy by pushing the individual's desire to fill the device.

The availability of pirated materials is facilitated in large part by a subculture supportive of piracy that has substantive ties to the computer hacker community. This relationship is due to the technical challenges posed by protective efforts from the recording industry to keep intellectual property from being copied. Specifically, individuals must often break or “crack” copyright protections on DVDs, Blu-Ray disks, and software to distribute these materials online. Hackers began to subvert protections on software to share programs with others in the early 1980s. These files were initially distributed through password-protected Bulletin Board Systems, and the individuals who posted and shared programs were commonly referred to as “warez doodz,” which is a corruption of software and “dudes.” Though this name did not last into the modern computing era, much of the infrastructure to support piracy operates in part through networks created by creative computer engineering. File-sharing protocol systems, like Napster and GNUtella, were developed over the past two decades to encourage the efficient downloading of large files across distributed networks. Thus, the hacker and piracy subcultures share historic ties that will likely persist with technological innovations.

In the modern online environment, individuals can now easily acquire pirated media and software through various outlets. In fact, search engine queries can be used to identify websites where cracked software may be immediately downloaded. Peer-to-peer file-sharing services, such as Limewire or Kazaaa, enable individuals to identify pirated software that is hosted on computers around the world. This infrastructure connects systems together to directly download materials through easy-to-use software. Individuals in the piracy community are also increasingly using a distributed file-sharing program involving torrents to rapidly download large amounts of pirated materials or intellectual property across multiple systems. Torrents operate in a fashion similar to peer-to-peer networks, only the infrastructure is distributed across multiple computers. As such, files are broken up, and the various components are downloaded at the same time and reassembled onto a destination computer, rather than a single peer-to-peer connection. This process is much faster than traditional peer-to-peer file sharing and enables users to download entire discographies in a much more efficient fashion than ever before.

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