Social Media Campaign: Online Piracy

Piracy is unauthorized reproduction or use of copyrighted items such as books, movies, music and television shows. Many such items are uploaded to the Internet by people who have bought the item themselves and wish to share it with other people who can then watch or listen to the song, to the movie without having to pay any money. So what’s the problem with this? You get to download music for free, watch movies and shows before they have even been released to the public. What could be better?

Well there are several consequences to these actions. First of all is economic loss. This loss of money affects all industries involved, such as the entertainment industry, the music industry and the film industry. But this loss is not only centered in these concentrated spots but affects our national economy, GDP or gross domestic product. The goal is for our GDP to increase, not decrease, which is what the economic loss caused by online piracy, is doing.The second consequence is that many employees are actually losing jobs as well. It is a positive correlation. As the loss of money increases, so does the percentage of job loss.Lastly is that online piracy is, according to law, illegal. Many people think that oh, I’m one person compared to the other 318.9 million people living in the USA, the government will never find me. That may be true but it doesn’t mean what you or I am doing isn’t illegal.

It’s a proposed bill introduced by US Representative Lamar Smith in late 2011. It that aims to crack down on copyright infringement by restricting access to sites that host or facilitate the trading of pirated content. The proposed law would have expanded existing criminal laws to include unauthorized steaming of copyrighted material, imposing a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

Methods such as SOPA aren’t going to work and could potentially just increase the problem itself. What we need to address first is a different problem, the real problem: how digital content is being sold.

One potential solution is the pay what you want to pay. The idea behind this basically means that users will pay what they think the item is worth. This concept has rarely, if ever, been implemented in the selling of digital content. But there have been cases in restaurants around the country that have implemented this concept. One such chain is Panera Bread, which I’m sure most of you know of. They actually have five locations that have this pay what you want policy and three years in it has proven to be a success. 60% of customers pay full price, 20% pay less or nothing and 20% paying more. As you can see, this policy does have the potential to be a success.

I have titled this social media campaign as “For what it’s worth”. This campaign will start from a website and hopefully will spread throughout the Internet through other social media platforms through hashtags, articles or posts. Of course with this new concept, we would not know exactly the side effects of the implementation of this policy on digital content. It could be a huge success or it could be a total failure. But it isn’t till we try first that we will know.

http://forwhatitsworthrhet.weebly.com/


Comments

Social Media Campaign: Online Piracy — 1 Comment

  1. This is a good idea, however I would make sure you have the ability to reenforce your statement and idea with evidence and statistics to show the economic decline to this problem.

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