Recently Jeff Zucker took over one of the chief executive positions at NBC Universal, and his job is to get better ratings for the company and also to fight piracy. Piracy is defined as: The unauthorized use or reproduction of copyrighted or patented material. Zucker spoke with the Us Chamber of Commerce to ask lawmakers to make harsher laws regarding piracy. Although the music industries method "sue and shut down" of illegal sharing websites and illegal DVD websites has been successful to a point, piracy is still on the rise. There are just too many sites that have been created that people can get copyrighted material for free. One of their arguments is saying that the once soaring DVD sales and CD sales have both plummeted in the past few years, and they say the reason for this is people are just pirating music and DVDs now. Zucker also released a study on the estimated economic impact of intellectual property piracy to the U.S. economy. "The study estimates that intellectual property piracy -- theft of music, movies, video games and software -- costs the U.S. economy $58 billion per year and s 350,000 lost jobs in the entertainment industry and its supplying industries".
Piracy is clearly an issue in today's society. Most of the pirated material comes from people between the ages of 18-24 years old. Umass is a prime example where piracy is an issue. There have been a high number of students who have been accused of illegally downloading music and videos illegally from websites such as Limewire and Bearshare. I feel that is there are much harsher laws regarding piracy that this problem will diminish. Also, I feel that people don't know what the piracy laws actually are, if harsher laws are enforced they should be publicized so everyone will know the extent of what could happen. Clearly something has to be done because many music company's and movie company's are being affected in a negative way so something has to be done to resolve this problem.
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