It looks like the governments across the globe are finally realizing the menace of internet piracy which is seriously putting pressure on already turmoiled piracy related sectors like entertainment and software industry.
A few days ago Sweden enacted the much hyped copyright law, named Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive.
This law halved the internet traffic on the first day itself. Sweden is home to the world’s largest BitTorrent sharing site, The Pirate Bay and Sweden has one of the highest Internet penetration rates in Europe.
The IPRED law forces ISPs to reveal the names of people attached to IP addresses suspected of sharing copyrighted music, movies, other files without permission.
At the same time France is also closer in enacting a similar law thereby reducing internet piracy and other european countries could also follow the same steps. This restrictions would also put a serious question mark on the privacy of users as the government can utilize their current security infrastructure to keep an eye on internet activities of citizens.
According to BSA, globally 36% of the software used is pirated. In the European Union the number was just a percent higher at 37%, while in the USA the estimation is significantly lower at 22%.
The piracy rate in the Asia/Pacific region was 53 percent, with dollar losses totaling more than $7.5 billion.
The main question is..
These laws can curb internet piracy to a great extent as the scare of getting caught and paying more than the acquisition cost would put pirates in jeopardy. Even if countries who don’t have the infrastructure to put this solution in place can go and ban the music sharing and illegal torrent sites in the country.
Internet piracy is the root cause of all virus and trojan related problems curbing it would help in the longer term and is also better for users as this would seriously reduce the prices of legal stuff as and when the volume picks up.
This time it looks like the affected industry are standing up in arm and pushing government to go ahead with their piracy curbing laws.
