(from Educational Origami -- Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 2.5)
The term piracy conjures up ideas of sailing ships, eye patches and swash buckling adventure. However the reality of piracy is simple; PIRACY IS THEFT!
No matter what face you put on it, no matter whether it is software, music or movies PIRACY is THEFT! Bit torrents, limewire, Kazaa have made the theft of music, movies and programs as simple as clicking a mouse.
Most of us would never consider walking into a video store and stealing a DVD and yet we use programs that do exactly that. The impact of piracy is often seen to be distant and excused by comments like "Well, they are paid millions for that", but the reality is that piracy costs the recording artists and software producers billions of dollars each year, it discourages creativity and increases prices.
It also has an effect in your own neighborhood, it directly decreases employment. When movies or music is stolen by being downloaded your local music or video store loses sales and this undermines the viability of the business and the livelihoods of the owner and employees.
There are alternatives. The creative commons licensing agreements have made available millions of images, masses of media, libraries of books that are available accessible and free. It is worth considering, when you publish your works, using the creative commons license. Creative commons is a license or statement of use that encourages people to share. Under the creative commons license you can use set the level of rights a user has to your intellectual property. Visit http://creativecommons.org/ to find out more.
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Date last modified: October 20, 2009.
Heartland Area Education Agency 11
