What is Online Piracy?
Music theft is a real, ongoing and evolving challenge. Both the volume of music acquired illegally without paying for it and the
resulting drop in revenues are staggering. Digital sales, while on the rise, are not making up the difference.
Common Examples of Online Copyright Infringement:
You make an MP3 copy of a song because the CD you bought expressly permits you to do so. But then you put your
MP3 copy on the Internet, using a file-sharing network, so that millions of other people can download it.
Even if you don’t illegally offer recordings to others, you join a file-sharing network and download unauthorized copies
of all the copyrighted music you want for free from the computers of other network members.
In order to gain access to copyrighted music on the computers of other network members, you pay a fee to join a file-
sharing network that isn’t authorized to distribute or make copies of copyrighted music. Then you download
unauthorized copies of all the music you want.
You transfer copyrighted music using an instant messenging service.
You have a computer with a CD burner, which you use to burn copies of music you have downloaded onto writable
CDs for all of your friends.
Somebody you don’t even know e-mails you a copy of a copyrighted song and then you turn around and e-mail
copies to all of your friends.
Who Music Theft Hurts
It’s commonly known as “piracy,” but that’s too benign of a term to adequately describe the toll that music theft takes on the
enormous cast of industry players working behind the scenes to bring music to your ears. That cast includes songwriters,
recording artists, audio engineers, computer technicians, talent scouts and marketing specialists, producers, publishers and
countless others.
While downloading one song may not feel that serious of a crime, the accumulative impact of millions of songs downloaded
illegally - and without any compensation to all the people who helped to create that song and bring it to fans - is devastating.
One credible IPI-Institute For Policy Innovation pegs the annual harm (and only about in the US) at $12.5 billion dollars in
losses to the U.S. economy as well as more than 70,000 lost jobs and $2 billion in lost wages to American workers.
