What Is Internet Piracy? (Part II)

Hello, it's Fred!  I hope you're having a spooktacular Hallowe'en.  Are you donning a costume to go a-haunting in your local neighborhood?  Perhaps you're going as a witch?  Or a Santa Claus?  Or a PIRATE??  Or perhaps....all three?

Ahoy ho ho ho!

In keeping with our theme of Internet piracy: what are some ways that Internet piracy can occur?  With what specific Internet technologies is it accomplished?

Why do people pirate things?  Well, there are many different reasons.  Perhaps they simply don't wish to pay the full price for something, or perhaps they want an item that is difficult to find on the "white market".  In fact, Internet piracy doesn't even have to be intentional; you don't necessarily have to know that something was pirated illegally in order to download it illegally.  This issue of intention in piracy will be discussed in later posts; I'm interested to explore the social, cultural, and psychological motivations for piracy in a bit more depth.


The motives for procuring something illegally are manifold and varied; therefore, there are many different ways of obtaining pirated material.  One of the oldest and (still) most common ways of distributing pirated material is through peer-to-peer networks (P2P).  A modern spin on this that improves on the technology used is torrenting.  It's also possible to purchase CDs, DVDs, or other physical products on websites such as Craigslist or eBay that were illegally produced or copied.  These are just a few of the ways that Internet users can purchase pirated material.   Again, I hope to explore many of these methods in greater depth in later posts.

These first two posts have served as a rough introduction to the intent of this blog.  I hope you have a better sense now of where we're going.  I can't promise we'll be able to address all of these many potential topics, but I hope you'll come along for the ride!  See you next time!