Bootlegging and Piracy
ENG122
Suzanne Kissel
May 13, 2013

Bootlegging and Piracy The World Wide Web is a great tool for sharing anything you want with anybody around the world. In just a few seconds you can upload a picture, video, song, and other types of multimedia to the internet. The problem with this what is this referring to? is when the material has been copyrighted. HOW IS IT A PROBLEM? The movie industry is one industry greatly affected by people’s ability to just upload and share whatever they feel like and whenever they feel like you can’t end a sentence with like..like doing what?. Every day millions of movies are illegally uploaded and shared via the internet. Illeagally downloading not only takes money from movie companies but from video stores, actors, directors, and anyone else involved with the production, manufacture, and sales of movies. While people have the right to post whatever they feel like on the internet, piracy and bootlegging hurt the movie industry, because the material is copyrighted; it takes jobs from people, and it takes money from the industry. Is this your thesis? Bootlegging and piracy affect more people than one might think. While millions of people all over the world continue to bootleg and pirate movies, movie industries are losing millions of dollars. Through recent technological advances and everything being digital now a days it is making makes it easier and easier to be able to steal copyrighted material and pirate it on the internet. People are able to bring high definition camcorders into movie theaters and record movies that have just been released and upload it directly to the internet. Once uploaded to the internet anybody can directly download it via torrents. Torrents are just large files that are broken up for faster downloading. According to an article in the Knight Rider Tribune, in the summer of 2002 The release of the summer's first blockbuster movies has sparked an unprecedented frenzy of film piracy, sending nearly 10 million people online to download bootleg copies of "Spider-Man" or "Star Wars: Episode II -- Attack of the Clones" (Chmielewski, 2002). By looking at famous Hollywood actors and directors you may not be able to notice the impact that bootlegging and pirating movies has on the movie industry because of their large houses and expensive cars and lifestyles. They are not the only ones affected by this although. Everyone from the camera man down to people who own mom and pop video stores, as well as the movie goers and consumers are affected. The movie industry tries to make up for the profit lost by illegal downloading by raising the prices of DVD’s, as well as the price of tickets to go see a movie in the theaters. The smaller video stores are feeling some of the biggest affects from the recent piracy trends and are shutting their doors all over the country and this means fewer jobs. Most movies these days start with a commercial about how it is wrong to download movies, comparing downloading movies to stealing a car. Although these are completely different and it would be as if someone merely made a copy of your car but your car was still right where you left it, it doesn’t make it right. Some people will say it is covered in the first amendment, which is the freedom of speech, but with the material being copyrighted it is not meant to be shared with everyone. It is the same as citing words in a research paper that did not come directly from the author of the research paper. At the very start of every movie there is also a warning stating that illegally copying and distributing copyrighted material is a federal offence punishable by 10 years in prison and a $500,000 fine. Out of the millions of people that download and upload movies illegally on the internet very few are ever caught, considering almost every house hold has a broadband internet connection these days, it would be hard for federal agencies to