Italy Has Highest Illegal Download Activity, finds ESA

It's so interesting to relate things we do at home to things people our age are doing in italy. A big part of my interest in music has to do with copyright and how the world is changing with technology. In my opinion, as technology is changing faster and faster each day, the law needs to change too. Copyright law is so outdated that it is making children into criminals. Piracy and illegal downloading has become so easy and common to do among teens and young adults that is is now inevitable. To stop the downloading is out of the question. The government is now faced with a choice to change copyright law to all rights reserved to some rights reserved. To sum up my opinion of the situation is to simply pay for music like we pay for water, or cable, or our cell phones. Pay a monthly flat rate so that performing rights organizations can fairly shell out royalties to publishers, writers, and artists, and teens and young adults can stop being treated like criminals and thrown in jail for clicking buttons and listening to art. So simple it's unbelievable. Before I left for Italy I really only studied the copyright laws in the United States. It never crossed my mind that teens and young adults all across the world are doing the same thing everywhere. 

So, last night at Campo St Margarita I found myself in a conversation that blew my mind. As soon as we go there this boy started bothering us to buy us drinks, so finally we started talking to this group of 27-something year old Venetian boys. Anyway, to make a long story short one of them was in law school. We got into a copyright conversation and I had to ask them how they felt about piracy. Not surprisingly these boys who live on the other side of the world use limewire and bittorrents just like we do. I asked them if they were familiar with The Pirate Bay and the recent charges against 4 men who ran the web site. (If you don't know about this basically 4 sweedish guys are in jail for starting a website where you can find bittorrents). The guys told me that they were aware of what happened but it didn't matter. In italy they download for free always, without question or fear. For the rest of the night this subject was on my mind so I had to research it when I got home.

I found an article in GameDaily titled "Italy Has Highest Illegal Download Activity, Finds ESA". The article explains that Italy and Spain were found to be the two biggest offenders for illegal downloads and eastern Europe has always been thought of as a haven for piracy. This is a total shock for me. I had no idea that piracy was so popular in Europe. This just makes me more and more frustrated with the way our government deals with copyright laws. If it isn't already obvious in the United States that the laws need to be changed it is also obvious everywhere else in the world, and I am experiencing it first hand. James Brightman (the author of this article) states that "Data from studies conducted in December 2008 revealed "alarmingly high" volumes of illegal downloads across the leading P2P networks, BitTorrent and eDonkey. Italy led the pack with the heaviest illegal download activity (17%). News to me!

Check it out for yourselves.

http://www.gamedaily.com/articles/news/italy-has-highest-illegal-download-activity-finds-esa/?biz=1