My Position about Movie Piracy (Essay Sample)

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My Position about Movie Piracy:
Movie piracy is among the rampant forms of intellectual property theft in the entire world, which negatively affects the financial performance of the film industry. It refers to the illegitimate copying, distribution, performance, as well as utilization of copyright resources like television and movie shows for commercial or personal gains (Segrave 2003). Generally, it is easy to get pirated copies of latest movies at a cheaper price once an individual takes a walk along busy streets compared to the cost of a movie ticket. This clearly indicates that the practice has many consequences both positive and negative to movie vendors, consumers, government, movie producers, and the film industry as a whole. Therefore, appropriate remedies need to be devised to end this practice.
Film piracy increases consumers’ expenditure on movies since pirate movies are of low quality and tends to last for a shorter time making them do constant purchase. Besides, it reduces revenue to the government, as consumers tend to download movies from the internet. This makes them forego the amount they would have incurred had they purchased the items from licensed vendors. While Nollywood, Hollywood and other film industries incur huge movie expenses, their gains continue to decline as consumers use unscrupulous means to obtain films at cheap means posting losses to the whole film industries. Moreover, movie piracy emasculates actors, depriving them of income from their artistic work. Undoubtedly, it also devalues the aptitude of actors and what they work for since the movies are sold as disposable items rather than artistic work.
In spite of the previously mentioned negative impacts of music piracy, it has some outstanding benefits to consumers, music vendors, and nation as a whole. The practice provides consumers with opportunities to watch movies at their convenience and at affordable prices since pirated movies are accessible and cheap. As asserted by Shiferaw (2009), movie piracy is a source of employment, especially to educated and unemployed individuals; this makes them earn a living and improve their standards of life. Most of the pirated movies are translated to the native language of the consumers, enabling them to get satisfaction from the movies. In addition, movie piracy acts a source of income to the movie vendors and improves the nations’ Gross Domestic Products leading to increased economic growth and development (Shipman 2007).
Due to the aforementioned consequences of movie piracy, the practice seems to be on the rise and correct measures need to be in place to curb this trend. While penalties on downloading intellectually protected content exist, it is almost impossible to indict every user who downloads a given movie. This makes the penalties ineffective. Therefore, it is necessary to make the aforementioned content unavailable to solve this problem collectively rather than relying on castigating individuals downloading the replicated movies. Essentially, the film industry in collaboration with the national government should fully implement the piracy rules and bring to book the victims of such illegal acts. Besides, the government and inter...