Anti-Piracy Laws (Part Three)

          The bill that former President George W. Bush signed in 2008 called the PRO-IP Act was designed to have greater efforts to control the pirating that has been running rampant.  There was another bill that was put together since then called the COICO which has been intensely criticized because of its vague definitions of what is considered a infringement website or what they called a rogue website.  There is another bill that is waiting to be signed into law today called the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property, otherwise known as PROTECT-IP.  This bill is a rewrite of the COICO.  It is more specific of the websites that would be considered illegal.  This bill would have a huge impact on illegal copyrights all around the world.  They would be able to go after the foreign websites that sell or allow you to stream movies for free that they stole.

       According to the Creative America coalition there are two millions jobs in the film and TV sector that could be affected by ongoing piracy.  They claim that 140,000 jobs have been lost as an effect of piracy of film and TV shows. Billions of dollars are lost each year due to illegal sales of stolen IP in the TV and film world.  According to the Institute if Policy Innovation the film industry lost 20 billion dollars in 2005 to illegal downloads of movies and TV shows.  If this was to happen every year imagine the affect it will have year in and year out.  This means that there will be less money to make new movies.  This will create more job loss and affect the pensions of those who have already retired from the film business.  The unions of the film business like AFTRA totally support the PROTECT-IP bill that is sitting in Washington right now.  The film industry would benefit so much from this bill.  They would be able to stop foreign websites from providing movies that are copyrighting.  

             According to the RIAA the music industry loses 4.2 billion dollars to piracy each year.  There are three types of people who lose out because of the piracy.  First, is the consumer loses out.  Those who are downloading music illegally drive up the cost of legitimate product that a honest consumer will have to pay.  That is why CD’s are so expensive.  Also, have you ever wondered why ticket sales of your favorite artist are so extraordinarily high?  It is because of illegal downloads and revenue being lost because of that.  Artists have to make it up somehow.  To go along with that retailers are having hard time convincing consumers to pay more money for the same product.  We always gravitate to the lowest price as a society.  If consumers can find the music online and save a few bucks why not.  The problem with that is, if retailers cannot compete with online sales of illegal downloads than what will happen?   Well, jobs will be lost because retailers cannot justify more employees.