Illegal Downloading

Illegal downloading is taking place all around the world. Much of which is hard to monitor and control. Incidents like with the little girl should not have to happen though. People may understand why industries have pushed the issue so strongly. There is another side to the issue. We are now living in a technology driven society. We do the majority of things these day though the internet.

Among all the reasons organizations and businesses frown on online piracy, there is definitely some positives. Companies could utilize the methods people use to illegally download media to distribute their software or entertainment media more efficiently Overall making it available to many more audiences. In America as a whole society we tend to want to know how something is before we get it. There are individuals who actually purchase a legal copy of media after illegally downloading it.

The reason this is important is the right to freedom for many. Companies may be losing some profits, but should it really be about money. Recently it appears that the movie industry has people from the Department of Homeland Security patrolling movie theatres. An individual with google glasses was removed from the theatre for supposedly recording the movie with the glasses. (Collier, 2012) What makes the situation bad is the fact that the individual was not committing the crime. There are many government resources being used these last few years for things like that.

Figure 1: Stop Online Piracy Act

Figure 1: “SOPA is an acronym for the Stop Online Piracy Act. It's a proposed bill that aims to crack down on copyright infringement by restricting access to sites that host or facilitate the trading of pirated content.” (2012).

In Figure 1, the SOPA bill was meant to censor the websites people use to pirate media. At first it was to force internet service providers to block the illegal websites. The bill went back and forth to congress but eventually was shelved.

On another note there...