Piracy!!!

The word "Piracy" means Copyright infringement (or copyright violation) is the unauthorized or prohibited use of works covered by copyright law, in a way that violates one of the copyright owner's exclusive rights, such as the right to reproduce or perform the copyrighted work, or to make derivative works.Piracy in India is an old story. It's open and normal and so hard to convince people that there is something wrong.

Maybe without piracy, we wouldn't watch as many movies,read as many books or use as much high-end software as we do now.most probably we'd all be quite upset if all access to pirated material was suddenly blocked.We're at the pirate party already,and we don't even think it's a problem.

The popularity of mp3 has led to an exponential increase in audio piracy.You can get a mp3 player for just 150` and almost all mobiles support the mp3 format these days.Even the albums which are hard to find are easily available in the streets for a price that’s nearly 1/10^th of the original disc.Internet is the best place to find almost anything.

Movies piracy is rising rapidly than audio or software piracy.One of the main reasons is the high entertainment taxes.Movies tickets are no less than 100`-200`.A movie in the weekend with your family will be around 1000`-1500`.The price of the pirated movie ranges from 50`-100` which sounds as sweet music to our wallets.To those who have a broadband connection at home pirating is just a piece of cake with all the torrents and download managers waiting to help you.

A genuine game DVD could cost you around 500`-2000` and the pirated copies are just 50`.The obvious reason for buying pirated games are affordability.One of the drawbacks of these pirated DVDs are they don’t come with any guarantee.I have spent 5GB of downloading only on “NFS Most Wanted” and I still can’t find working copy(and I’m still trying for a working copy :P).

Pirated software are so easily available that many are reluctant to buy the original copy.When you buy a branded Desktop or laptop you get a licensed version of windows,but when you buy an assembled PC most probably you’ll end up with an illegal copy.Adobe CS5 master collection that officially cost about 1,55,000` is free for download or available for less than 0.5% of its original price.

Enough about the ways of piracy lets see what the law says about these acts.According to the “Copyright Act of section 63” piracy is non-bailable offence.They can go in for six months to a year.Repeaters will get some more time to accompany the police.

Even if they are arrested this isn’t something that will end abruptly without a trace.We the people must stop buying and downloading pirated things(well that’s a hard thing to do :P).We should start using open source software in that way we can motivate the developer and at the same time stop the act of piracy.

I want to thank Rohit & Ranjith for their help and the editor of the Chip magazine from which I got most of the statistics(and some lines too:P).