Zach Nading
Period 3
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Nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars will be lost by 2015 from pirated content. With sites like The Pirate Bay and Kickass torrents making it as simple as a few clicks away, downloading illegal copies of music, TV shows, movies and other software has never been easier. In the second quarter of 2014, an estimated 10 billion movies, TV shows and many other files had been downloaded worldwide. Six percent of that was illegal downloads, 600 million illegal downloads in just a three month period. Copyright infringement is one of the many horrible things that happens today and we need to come up with a better way to prevent it.
There are many policies that are used to let a person know if they have downloaded something illegally, one of those is the Copyright Alert System (CAS). This lets content producers such as filmmakers and music producers connect to peer-to-peer networks and notify an internet service provider (ISP) of the illegal activity then which ISP then lets the subscriber know of such activity. Now, this system is a little lenient on how people are to go about this notice. The person who is paying for the internet can finally put a password on their Wi-Fi connection, they could also let other people know that they got the notice and tell them not to do it. If the illegal activity keeps up, then the ISP can do pretty much whatever they want with the internet connection, some of the most common actions include: slowing down the speed of their internet or they will redirect you, no matter what website you go to to a site of their own until you call them. Even with policies like this in place, people still pirate content. What we could do is have content creators experiment with releasing their movies simultaneously scheduling both digital and theater release. We could have a dedicated subscription based service for this, much like Spotify but for video.
In the second quarter of 2014, there was ten billion downloads of content such as movies, TV shows, music, and video games, Tru Optik, a media analytics firm, estimates that only six percent of those downloads were legal; that is only 600,000,000 downloads. Also during the second quarter this year, Game Of Thrones had 298.9 million illegal downloads. That is almost six times more than the second most pirated show, The Big Bang Theory, with 63.2 million illegal downloads. HBO lost several millions in revenue due to this piracy. According to statistics that Tru Optik released, HBO lost over half a million dollars in video ads, over eight million dollars in iTunes availability and over nine million dollars in potential subscribers. That is nearly eighteen million and five-hundred thousand dollars in lost money. That money could have gone towards a lot of different things such as making more episodes of the show or HBO creating more great TV Shows.
How to prevent piracy? Well, there are many different ideas that people have come up with, the one that I mentioned earlier, about releasing movies digitally the same time they are in theaters, came from Peter Eckersley he is a projects director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation a digital