TL;DR Learning about the law of on-line Piracy by interviewing fellow colleagues
The digital world of piracy has caused many people people to suffer, by either losing potential revenue they lost from people pirating them, or being a digital pirate themselves and being caught. Even though digital piracy is illegal, people still perform it because of its low risk and high reward when dealing with it. People perform piracy for many reason and I decided to interview my roommate about piracy and what he knew about it.
1.) When you think of piracy what do you think? At first when you asked me about doing an interview on piracy I thought you were talking about the Pirates that roam the seas, but that wouldn’t make sense for an interview so I realized you were talking about digital piracy. Knowing this I really don’t know much about digital piracy other then to perform it is against the law.
2.) Learning that you could pirate items like textbooks to use them in classes, and for education purposes, would you think it’s fair for them to do this? I wouldn’t say it’s fair for them to do because it’s against the law but I wouldn’t have any problem with them performing it. It’s their life and they should be allowed to do whatever with it even if it’s illegal.
3.) Have you ever pirate an item before, and are you ever think of doing it? No, I haven’t but I was thinking about doing it, to pirate some music on-line before but I didn’t know how to do it, so I didn’t.
4.) Did you know that piracy is against federal law? I knew that it was illegal, but I didn’t know that it was against federal law.
5.) Learning that piracy is being against federal law, would you ever pursue in using piracy to get something free? Probably not, but I do have a couple friends that perform piracy and I see the benefits of it even though you could face harsh punishments if they were caught.
6.) What do you think the government should do to help prevent piracy? I would say the best thing to do to prevent it is to inform people more about it and why they shouldn’t be pirating items.
7.) What would you say should be a proper punishment for being caught with doing piracy? If you pirate items they should be placed into information class about piracy and why it is illegal. But if they face a second offense they should be fined heavily because they are stealing someone else’s work.
8.) Do you know anyone that has been convicted of piracy? If so what kind of punishment did they face? I don’t know anyone personally that has been convicted of piracy but some people in my high school were caught pirating on school computers and were fined pretty harshly and were banned from using school computers. I would say they got off pretty easy for making such a dumb decision.
9.) Would you say piracy is huge problem we face in 2017? I would say it’s problem but we overreact to it too much.
10.)Final question, after learning all about piracy do you think it should be illegal? I think it should stay illegal, but shouldn’t face such a harsh punishment like I said before. It’s not like piracy is like drug dealing or killing someone which are both extremely illegal I might add.
Before and after the interview, I went back and looked at the actual law that is forced when performing digital piracy. I learned that the laws were placed on digital piracy for instead of people being fined harshly with what they are doing,but for stealing the item but to protect the creator’s own work. By law, when you are making unauthorized copies of someone’s creative work, you are in fact stealing something of value from the owner without their permission. If you are caught doing this you could face civil and criminal liability. Criminal charges may leave you with a felony record, accompanied by facing up to five years in jail and up to $250,000 worth of fines. So next time you decided that you need to pirate an item, do not it is not worth it.
Work Cited
About Piracy.” RIAA. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Apr. 2017.
pirate flickr photo by Jason A. Howie shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license </small>