Digital Piracy Era: A Need for an Innovative

Approach
Andrei C APASTRU

March 19, 2017

Research
What should companies that produce paid digital content: paid software, movies and
music, perform in order reduce the piracy towards their paid digital content.
Digital Piracy - digital piracy is the illegal distribution of copyrighted material. This
can mean anything from illegally downloading a song, movie, e-book, or software. If you
share a song, movie, e-book, or software, you are also considered a digital pirate (Digital
Piracy, 2016).
Types of digital content:

Video Types of video content include home videos, music videos, TV shows, and movies.
Many of these can be viewed on websites such as YouTube, Hulu, CBS, and so on, in which
people and companies alike can post content. However, many movies and television shows are
not available for free legally, but rather can be purchased from sites such as iTunes and Amazon.
Software In recent years, there has been an increase in access to freeware. Examples of
this include free computer software such as Mozilla Firefox, and operating systems such as
Linux distributions. Many applications such as Facebook and YouTube also provide users with
functionality to post and share free content online.
Audio Music is the most common form of audio. Spotify has emerged as a popular way for
people to listen to music either over the Internet or from their computer desktop. Digital content
in the form of music is also available through Pandora and last.fm, both of which allow listeners
to listen to music online for no charge.
Images Photo and image sharing is another example of digital content. Popular sites used
for this type of digital content includes Imgur, where people share self-created pictures, Flickr,
where people share their photo albums, and DeviantArt, where people share their artwork. Pop-
ular apps that are used for images include Instagram and Snapchat. (Digital content, 2017)

Methods
The paper will be presented in form of a literature review and secondary research, the
review being conducted following the guidelines by Webster and Watson (2002). Data col-

1
lection is performed according to Doolan and Froelicher (2009) suggestions about how to
use an existing data set to answer the research questions.
Papers and articles used in the research (list is yet to be completed): clickable links

Piracy and Social Change (Schwarz & Burkart, 2015)

Spotify Kills Piracy AND Paid Downloads, European Study Finds
Statistics source 2010 PIRACY STUDY, May 2011
Digital Piracy Stronger than Ever
The Societal Costs of Digital Piracy (Danaher & Waldfogel, n.d.)
The Societal Costs of Digital Piracy
Security firm warns of malware risks in pirated software
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies(Brown,
2014)
Music industry claims 95% of downloads illegal as CD sales fall
Netflix steps up piracy fight by sending take-down notices to Google
Internet piracy falls to record lows amid rise of Spotify and Netflix
Spotify Kills Piracy AND Paid Downloads, European Study Finds

References
Brown, S. C. (2014). Approaches to digital piracy research. Convergence, 20(2), 129-
139. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1354856513517470 doi:
10.1177/1354856513517470
Danaher, B., & Waldfogel, J. (n.d.). Reel piracy: The effect of online film piracy on interna-
tional box office sales. SSRN Electronic Journal. doi: 10.2139/ssrn.1986299
Digital content. (2017, Mar). Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved from https://en
.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_content#Paid_digital_content
Digital piracy. (2016). Retrieved from http://cybercrimeproject.weebly.com/
digital-piracy.html
Schwarz, J. A., & Burkart, P. (2015). Piracy and social change. Popular Communication, 13(1),
1-5. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2015.990329
doi: 10.1080/15405702.2015.990329