Is Piracy a Crime?

Internet piracy is the downloading and distribution of digital products illegally. The
contents unlawfully downloaded include; video games, movies, software, and music. The illegal
downloads deny content producers royalty in terms of lost revenues, and also destroy business
models because the publishing houses spend a fortune in creating products but do not get returns.
As a result, the federal government has responded by making online piracy a criminal offense
attracting a jail term of not more than ten years and a fine of over $250,000.
Online piracy costs the American economy between $210 and $260 billion annually and
attributed towards the loss of more than 700,000 American jobs annually (Tomczyk, 2021). There
are specific laws regarding what individuals should do and cannot do with the digital contents.
Normally, purchasing online content signifies that a person is licensed to play, read, use, or listen
to the content. The license does not provide the purchaser with the right to share, copy, trade, or
make money from the said content without prior written permission from the original producer
(Cummings, 2017). The act of copying digital contents including software, books, movies or video
game without prior permission from the producers is outright theft and punishable through
copyright related amendments. Online piracy is not different compared to shoplifting. The pirating
process does not matter if an individually illegally downloaded the material from the internet,
copied it from a colleagues, or acquired it from an individual dealing with illegitimate copies. They
are all considered outright theft (James, 2018).
In conclusion, piracy is a crime that happens at each second of the day and in every nation
in the world. By disregarding copyright law, intellectual property is being dissipated. By ignoring
the issue, it could only get worse. The two key ways of defeating piracy are prosecution and
education. Through mass education in a computer globalization time, assurance of piracy
knowledge will surge and confidently abate ignorance.