Argumentative Essay

Daniel Previch

English Composition 1

Argumentative Essay

24 August 2013

The Change of the Movie Industry

Pirating movies have been around for almost 20 years. People could just rent a VHS tape from their local video rental store and copy it as easy as pressing record on another tape player. Sounds easy, doesn’t it. Well, it is easy and millions and millions of people have been illegally stealing from the movie studios for a long time. It’s so big that it has progressed into multi-billion dollar loss for the movie industry. People are able to just go on their computer, visit a torrent site and download their movie within minutes. Although movie studios think illegal downloading is a serious problem, they must first develop a new business model to compete with modern technology.

In the past the most common way for possible thief to steal a movie is by downloading it from a torrent site. Torrents, are files that can be shared by anyone in the world and make larger downloads (such as movies) very inexpensive and efficient in transferring them from one computer to another. The thing that sets this technology apart is that it is a client. A client is similar to a web browser in that the web browser just displays the content for you to view. However, what the user looks at on that browser is not internet explorer’s fault, it’s the user. This is the same idea with torrent technology and has no way of monitoring what exactly is being transferred over the internet. This isn’t the only way thief’s pirate movies; there are other file sharing sites such as Kazaa and Limewire or perhaps DVD screeners are leaked from the employees at the movie studios.

By determining how exactly a thief steals a movie you can figure how to prevent it from happening. Jill Kipnis, a writer for billboard magazine stated in 2004 that “Anti-piracy experts say the studios have stepped up their efforts to stem the piracy tide in the past two years using three main weapons:...