Likewise media giants often fail to provide effective and fairly priced global digital distribution methods; we don’t all want or need to visit the cinema every time a new film comes out, especially with modern home cinemas being so sophisticated. Unfortunately the movie industry is understandably more concerned about protecting the profitability of their cinemas than opening up access to new media.

Piracy has of course been around for many years but never to the same scale as it is today, where the practice of downloading illegal content is now so prevalent that it risks becoming a socially acceptable activity.

The Impact

It doesn’t take a mathematical genius to work out that illegally downloading commercial content for free, especially when it occurs on such a massive scale, is going to have a financial impact on both its creators and publishers. Research group TNS estimates that P2P music piracy costs the UK record industry alone more than £400m every year.

This level of abuse can easily cause serious damage and you only need to look at the rampant piracy of PC games to see why. Developers have slowly pulled away from the platform in favour of consoles, which offer a more secure environment; though long-held concerns over high development costs for personal computers (PC’s) hasn’t helped.

One example of this is Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty 4 (COD4) war-game, a modern day action shooter. Infinity Ward’s Community Relations Manager, Rob Bowling, recently had the following to say about PC piracy in his personal blog: