Posted on August 20, 2016August 20, 2016

Online Piracy the unconscious crime

This online news of March, 2016 (Figure 1.) has make me feel very curious to discover what makes Online Piracy becomes so seriously to be called as a crime?

Though I’ve learned about piracy within mass media in class but now I want to concentrate more on Online Piracy due to the high range of Internet using globally.

So, what is Online Piracy and when was it happened?

There are many definitions of Online Piracy but I prefer this simple ones. Online Piracy could be understood as an act of an online user when he or she extracts the content, which they desire to have, off the victim’s website. Once being stolen, the content would be stripped of copyright or authorship information and posted on a different site and rendered as belonging to the ones who stole it.

Online Piracy has appeared long time ago since 1980s when Microsoft and Novell decided to charge fees for using their products. This is the beginning of piracy which comes from the technologists. Reasoning for this behaviour, after a period of time using software freely but suddenly they were asked to pay fees for using the things that they used to access freely, they would think that it’s not fair for them.

This phenomenon of Online Piracy climbs to peak in 1990s when the accessing to the Internet grew faster together with a peer to peer (P2P) platform called Napster appeared. This platform allow users to share any kind of online material to others.

Why does people piracy?

In fact, as my researches, there are many articles discuss about this question. And, the most common answer is because people believe that the act of online piracy is not illegal.

The statistic of Figure 2 could be the supporting element for this point of view.

People claimed that they choose to piracy just for simple desires, such as: listen to new music, playing games or watching the movie which they have missed without paying fees.

They also wonder why those normal purposes of entertaining by getting online piracy could cause to big problem?

Now, getting back to my first question: “What makes Online Piracy becomes so serious to be called as a crime?”

As we could obviously know that in order to make a movie, a music video, an app or software, MONEY is the first requirement and the amount of money which is in the requirement could be very large.

But when we come to Online Piracy, everything is “Free Download” and with the “help” of technology development – a tool called Internet Download Manager (IDM). Then, how could the original authors could get their money back?

From this point of view, no need to explain, we could imagine how much Online Piracy could “harm” the authors’ profits in particular and other entertainment fields in general.

Besides the effects caused by Online Piracy which showed in Figure 3, there are two fields which being effected the most:

– Economic loss: $17 billion per year (Pardon 2014).

– Music industry loss: 12.5 billion per year (Sun 2015).

Posted on December 6, 2015December 6, 2015

Social network – the dark and light sides

You would be a weirdo if you are not using social network – such as: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. – in this digital period. In fact, using social network has changed people behavior and attitude in both pros and cons perspectives.

People use the Internet for many different purposes such as reading news, gain knowledge, shopping and entertain. BUT, the crimes along with that also increase and appear a new kind of criminal – cybercrime.

Cybercrime makes use of social network like the fishing rob to trap online users. Unless the users prepare their securities, their accounts would be hacked and then used to treat the users’ acquaintances for money or other valuable things. For the goverment to control the crimes in the national scale is very hard, but now to control the cybercrime which is in the worldwide scope is much harder. This is because cybercrime is seen as a fast-growing area of crime and the victim could be anybody around the world.

Cyberbullying, on another hand, could be counted as one of the dark sides of social network. It has been recorded that their are many suicide cases caused by cyberbullying. But, I think the deeply reason behind this issue are due to the attitude and behavior of users. When we networking nobody knows who we are; thus, we think that no one could judge whether our acts and words are right or wrong – even if it would hurt other people. To make clear, arguing this does not mean bullying is not as serious as cyberbullying. What I want is to make the comparison that physical wounds, still, could be healed by medicine and treatment; but, mental injures are very hard to heal and it would maintain in a very long term.

I agree we won’t be ourselves when we networking – we could lies about our identities – we wear a “mask” on our faces every time we “step on” the Internet. However, although our personal identities are hid and could not be identified on social network, it does not mean we could hurt or make use of others.

Look at many disadvantage affects of social network, and we can see those negative impacts straightway but what make social network can overcome those “tumors”.

The real example which just happened lately is the terror in France in November 13th could be used as one of the persuasive answers for this question. Through social network (Facebook, Twitter,…) the whole wide world could know the condition of France in general; and, information about their relatives who travel to or work in this country in specific.

At that time, lots of people, by using the software which was produced by Facebook, to changed their avatars combined with the colors of national flag of France as well as typed the prays and wishes for the victims in that terror. Another example is the missing plan MH370 of Malaysia, also, through social network the news can be expanded and updated faster; and, people around the world could express their sympathy to the victims in the accident as well. Besides, throughout social network, many big events are commemorated worldwide every year, typically is the terror in the US in 11th 2001.

In the social networking period, the problems are world wide, each country does not have to face its issues alone anymore, the whole world would stand besides each other. Through this I could have the reason to believe that thanks to social network, the world is shrunk to become smaller.

Social network is just a channel for people to support their interests and purposes. The ways we use it to make it bring negative impacts or to become a bridge to link our hearts together are depend mostly on our attitudes.

“Remix culture” is truly an excuse for Online Piracy?

Online piracy is no longer a strange topic in this modern time anymore. In fact, it has been developing to become one of the most digital issue which has huge negative impacts on many fields such as: films, musics, games and software. Both of the government and copywriters have been struggling to find out the ways and solutions to resolve this problem.

However, everything has two sides of its. Besides its negative impacts, online piracy could be excused by the reason of enhancing the creativity of people through the remix culture, So, what is “remix culture”? If we search for the definition of this theory, there would be a list of academic articles describe about it. But in this blog, I want to make everything simple and strange forward for the aim of easily to understand. That is why throughout my researches “remix culture” could be simply defined as the action which people take the original artifacts and add, edit or manipulate it with some ideas and contents and make it become their own new versions.

Based on this culture, many people has built up or created their online personal identities. They become well-known or even famous in the entertainment fields. For instant, specifically in Vietnam, many individuals and groups are being acknowledged on YouTube by posting their videos about K-pop dancing covers – known as St. 319, SJ13VN and L.Y.N.T – or individual performance new versions of many famous songs – including K-pop, US/UK-pop, V-pop, etc. – typically are Vicky Nhung, Do Hoang Duong and Hoang Huong (Olia Hoang).

It is true that this culture requires lots of creatives; plus, with the aim for becoming famous and having their own statuses in the public by the remix ways, I believe that a large number of people would not know their actions are piracy. To support this, I have a friend – though she is not aim for the building status purpose, she – sometimes with her sisters – likes to listening K-pop and covers the dance in some of those songs then records and posts it on her private site and shares to her friends. But, the funny thing here is that when I asked her whether she known her actions could be counted as online piracy or not. With the surprise, she told me that she had done that just for fun and satisfied her hobbies but why it was judged as online piracy, it seemed like she had done something illegal.

In fact, it was just a small case of the remix culture conscious. Even myself, though I have not cover or manipulate any songs, dances and drawings, I have never thought that remix culture is suppose to be online piracy until I study about it. Oppositely, I’m even admire and support those covers by clicking the “Like” button and sharing those videos.

From that we can see online piracy could be caused by our daily or normally networking when we even have no idea that our acts are piracy. People cover the songs because they like those songs; they cover the dance performances because their idols perform those steps; or simply they do the cover just for fun and satisfied their will like the friend I have mentioned above. At other aspect, with the collectivist cultures, Vietnamese people really prefers to share the information or interesting stuff with each other. Thus, people who like and share remix artifacts like myself, it does not mean they are support online piracy.

At this rate, I can strongly argue that people who do the covers and people who expand those remix products could be due to different reasons – express their feelings, build online personal identity and satisfied their interests – but none of them would use the remix culture to defending their piracy.

Online piracy could be caused or blamed by many reasons but the remix culture is an exception – it is the key for people to develop their creatives not the excuse for online piracy.