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Welcome to SUNS 2008! |
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Committee: World Trade Organization Topic: Piracy Director: Jorge Gonzalez Herrera
Intellectual Property Piracy:
The definition of piracy used nowadays, is the act of making illegal copies of an authorized or copyrighted product, most of the times with the purpose of personal benefit, such as a profit. In other words, this is called theft. The act of piracy at first consisted in stealing, mostly for valuable objects, but today, the record companies are the ones that are mostly being affected by this problem since they are the ones that make the number one entertainment product consumed by the world.
These record companies are using the Consumption and E-commerce market to sell their products, which is music, throughout the internet and in stores, but mainly in the web. The problem is, when other people found out that they could share their files or music, and afterwards copy it, the consumers began spending less on the legal copies and instead sharing their files through free pages.
Since 2005, record companies sales have been off about 25% off yearly, so by now they would have lost nearly the 100%. With the effort of trying to find a way to stop piracy, companies such as EMI and even iTunes have been trying to reach an agreement with file sharing sites or programs and give them a “share” with advertisement or others. However, this would make these companies unrestricted traders.
Although music is the one mostly that is being pirated, software in general is the one that is also being pirated. By 2003, for example, Microsoft had lost US$10 billion estimated yearly because of what they could have sold but people downloaded freely through free pages.
The world’s country with most copyright material is the United States, which now is looking for solutions to stop the piracy of their productions spread worldwide by theft.
The factors that make most of the intellectual ideas piracy are two, which are corruption and trade barriers, for these are the ones that cause inside a country to spread copies of materials that for example they cannot get anywhere inside their nation.
As for the United States, their trade group with the record companies, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), makes sure that none of their legal material is copied and sold through the internet. Although they are the ones that make most of the work, the record companies work by themselves by raising the demands against illegal downloads.
This problem of online piracy involves very much the way these sites use their pages. For instance, file sharing is pretty much like a place where anyone can go without registering. There is nobody to search if there is not a central “lobby” for one to check in. The same thing happens when, in every music-sharing site, anybody can just enter any file and this data is not processed through a central computer. This is called “peer to peer”. This is the main reason that security cannot track down any file transfer. Also, the changing of the IP address does not help a lot security. The government also could start their Internet Service Provider, which could make the pirate music transfer easier. Also, by making a registered IP address for every computer, they could get their target in a blink of an eye. The problem is that IP addresses are like public parking lots:
Once a car leaves, the parking slot is free for other car to enter. Permanent IP addresses would be very expensive for the Internet Service Providers to make. I n Europe, mainly in France and the United Kingdom, their strategy is to start by securing Internet Service Providers. Since they are very developed countries, they might reach this by, as previously said, making a central computer for those pages which allow file share. United Kingdom, whose idea is to legalize those pages that have the most numbers of visitors a day and that may affect ISP’s, record companies and even telephone companies, such as Skype. They would do so by making them be watched over the government and joining dome of the previously told companies.
Companies that may be affected by piracy are affected by “unrestricted” web pages that give piracy services to their users yet they are most of the times shared by other people or paid. For example, a new way that internet and piracy have made a way to help people at the same time they affect companies, most of the times because this page may decrypt Voice over Internet Protocols. Anyways, companies such as Skype would not want to become an authorized user because of what they can earn daily if everybody would continue to use their services daily, almost 12 million a day, which could make it grow bigger in the next years because of their low cost.
Also, clothing piracy affects branded companies mainly in lesser developed countries, where people look for this brand in low costs. Since branded clothing companies sell their merchandise mostly through psychological and social views, people are more attracted to cheap yet branded clothing (even though it is pirated) because of the social views of this type of merchandise.
As for Asia, Armenia is the number one software pirate in the world. It is not the size of the country that matters, but their technological research that makes them sell 93% of their software as pirate. This small region below Georgia, in Southwestern Asia, has also a high index of corruption, but also not so many care and help from other neighbor countries.
In America, the first intellectual pirate would be Venezuela, with an 83% of pirated software inside the nation. Followed by this country comes Bolivia, with an 82% of pirated software, including Microsoft and other music companies in both countries previously mentioned. Since the government is often at conflict, these kinds of countries have not taken much care of this, but countries that follow the piracy index of America, such as Mexico, have begun taking actions such as internet observers and guards, mostly supported by United States, since they also take the lead at piracy in general in Latin America.
More actions taken by the software companies, such as Microsoft, Symantec, Adobe, etc. are starting an alliance called Business Software Alliance, which allows them to demand other companies from piracy of their products. This alliance, however, does not have any law enforcement by any government or authority, it is a NGO. Medicine Piracy:
A dangerous kind of piracy that has gained popularity is the medicine piracy. It is dangerous in a way that it can (obviously) affect a person’s health. But the real economic problem comes when these pirate-medicine producers take advantage of a person’s health situation to sell them cheaper medicine, even though this medicine may have been made from harmful ingredients.
This not only affects the economy of medicine enterprises or producers, but the population of a country in health. A common example would be in South American or African countries, where they usually use traditional medicine remedies for their diseases. But when the medicine companies expropriate the medicinal resources of the nearby areas, these countries are forced to acquire pirated medicine. In some cases, medicine may be copied or cloned exactly, in a legal way, to make it cheaper in mostly lesser developed countries.
The pros about the pirated medicine is that it may be cheaper to produce and its price, but most of the times it may be really dangerous, for the pirated medicine producers have even reached a level of using products such as animal venom in the creation of pirate medicines. Sometimes these products do not have any effect, but the index of deaths due to pirate medicine may grow more even on developed countries.
Branded clothing piracy:
Another way that the piracy has affected with other consuming markets is the piracy of branded clothing. It consists of selling people the exact copy of an expensive clothing brand for a cheaper price, for the manufacturers are from another country that has cheap laborers, like China or other Asian countries.
Then again, the E-commerce affects lots of branded clothing who spend millions on quality, for people each time buy their clothes more on the internet, which makes them an easy victim for those that sell pirate branded clothing through public market pages.
Counterfeiting is also a great problem for expensive and major brand sellers. This nowadays affects every country, specially developed countries. It is a fact that every kind of population consumes fake brands, and there is no way to stop them. Most of the times, a person cannot infer whether the product is fake, cloned or pirate or if it is original. Nowadays, technology has reached a point to make every product cheaper but physically identical when it is pirated. That is why it is called a fake.
But is there really a way to identify a fake product? While brand-product companies are losing profit or trying to find a way to stop this kind of piracy, people continue buying fake items, and has now generated discouraging of companies and the influence of piracy even in developed countries.
Questions to be asked when it comes to a solution are:
1. Should developed countries help lesser developed countries stop their products from being pirated there? 2. Should the countries or companies invest more in internet security, such as permanent IP addresses? 3. Should there be any penalty for those companies that are forming an unrestricted trade with file sharing sites or programs? 4. How can lesser developed countries encourage the anti piracy program? 5. Who should pay for anti piracy issues, the companies or the government?
Important things to know:
· United States is the number one copyright exports in the world. · France is the number one in Europe trying to find a solution to piracy. · Armenia is the number one pirate in the world. ISP: Internet Service Provider NGO: Non Governmental Organization Peer to Peer: most of the times file sharing programs with no central base. Guardians or Observers: Programs that detect when pirate software or music is being transferred in a pier to pier. IP address: A “slot” for internet access. It is changed whenever somebody access internet and other one leaves.
Bibliografy: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/piracy World Book M.13, page 214: Marketing http://www.moneybluebook.com/how-to-spot-a-fake-lacoste-polo-shirt-and-other-pirated-clothing/ http://schiff.house.gov/antipiracycaucus/ http://www.springerlink.com/content/e684811251414728/ http://www.riaa.com/aboutus.php http://www.diasiete.com/categoria/395 Semanal Día Siete: volume 395 http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article4164216.ece http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_sof_pir_rat-crime-software-piracy-rate Current Issues: Whose Music is it? 2006-2007 supplement 0http://www.afro.who.int/country_offices_press/2004/pr20040330.html
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