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Solutions & ConclusionOf course, all piracy is immoral, it is wrong to steal. Just because you are not stealing something from the shelf of a Wal-Mart store, does not mean that you are not stealing. According to Abbas Aminmansour, "Regardless of how the infringer sees it... piracy is theft of intellectual property and is no more justifiable than shoplifting, stealing cable service or other utilities. Developers invest time and money to develop a... product and deserve to make a fair profit - so they can develop new ...products. This is particularly crucial for small developers... whose survival depends on income from sales to a limited market" (Aminmansour). Obviously, piracy on the Internet is not going to be completely shut down just by a few aggressive organizations. If they shut down one site, 10 more will pop up. The way the situation is now, there is no way to stop it. However, several methods proposed by Peter Troost may help in the war on piracy. One way would be to "build copy protection into an operating system. Through the operating system, the 'copy' operation could be monitored to check for patented software" (Troost). Another method Troost proposes is "meterware" (Troost). Also known as "superdistribution" (Troost), this method would make the program "count how many times [the program] as been invoked. The users would have to dial into a billing number once per month" (Troost), and charge the user a pay-per-use fee. "Meterware" (Troost) could be modified to combine how many times the program is run with how long the program runs. This modification would compensate for cut and paste operations, and system crashes, when the program may only run a short time. In conclusion, the damage done to the industry and legitimate end user does not outweigh the few advantages that piracy does have. The chances of being caught, the fines, and the jail sentences are constantly increasing. Contrary to what many of the uninformed pirates believe, most of their arguments are invalid. With anti-piracy organizations lobbying the government to pass new laws, the few valid arguments that they still do have are disappearing. Even though anti-piracy organizations have made great strides in their fight, with the enormous growth of the Internet, current anti-piracy methods will not completely stop piracy. Organizations and industry need to come up with solutions to increase copyright protection, inform the uneducated, and negate the advantages that computer piracy has. [ Next - Links ]
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