Are you a Pirate?

Piracy is a crime in the U.S., and most of us do it at one point or another.  Many people do it and never think twice about it. What most people don’t know is that 50.4 billon dollars has been lost since 2009 form piracy.  For those of who don’t know, anyone who sells, acquires, copies or distributes copyrighted materials without permission is called a pirate. The most prolific pirating nations are Brazil, India, and China. The average piracy rate in the Asia-Pacific area is 59%. Yahoo News reports that the 59% number means that 900 million computers in the area run pirated software.
(http://www.dailytech.com/Report+501B+Lost+Globally+to+Software+Piracy/article18350.htm)

With this being said, do you think that piracy is something that should become banned altogether?  There are many groups, policies, acts, and etc…. that work day and night on preventing and punishing piracy. On Jan. 20, 2012, U.S. Representative Lamar Smith withdrew the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) from consideration on the House floor. The proposed legislation drew fire from numerous critics while massive organizations like the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) and Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) defended it. With this much support behind an act like this, it is hard to just ignore and keep everything the same. 

Let's get this out of the way right at the start: Stealing is wrong. It's unethical and usually illegal to take something that doesn't belong to you without permission or some form of compensation. It's easy to illustrate this point with physical objects -- if you steal apples from a store, that store has fewer apples to sell to other customers. But things get a bit tricky when it comes to digital property. When somebody steals an app from apple through jail breaking, apple does not lose any stock or items. They simply lose out on a chance to make money. This is why people have such a hard time accepting that piracy is wrong.

So ask yourself how you feel about piracy.

Imagine how the companies feel about losing billions of dollars every year. Also think about the people who pirate the material and imagine how they feel about all the strict new laws and policies.