Tracing Media Piracy: Current and Future Trends

Abstract

This chapter assesses the current and future trends and trajectory of the optical media piracy in the Philippines and Vietnam as well as in the world. Media piracy is an evolving cybercrime which can easily adapt to the current technological and global environment. This chapter also traces briefly the development of media piracy from the VCR technology using the cassette format to the current digital and nanotechnology using the Internet and file sharing protocols. Optical disc piracy will be a transitory phenomenon in developing countries with underdeveloped IP and Internet culture. As a country increases in Internet penetration, the locus of media piracy shifts from the temporal space of the sidewalk stalls selling pirated DVDs or illegal CD–DVD shops to the cyberspace of the Internet. The use of discs becomes less popular as online media piracy becomes more convenient, easier, and cheaper with direct illegal downloading, peer-to-peer sharing, and other evasive techniques with the latest sophisticated hardware and software technologies. This chapter then examines some popular and current online digital piracy such as peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, cyberlocker, media box, anti-circumvention technology, digital spying and hacking, and other online piracy supported by digital, cloud, and nanotechnology. It also makes projections on how media piracy would develop with the advent of quantum computing and technology. Media piracy follows technological advancement and innovation, thus making it difficult for authorities to curb. It uses the same technology used by copyright holders which provides them with a variety of options to respond to regulation. Finally, this chapter examines the difficulty of regulating the Internet and the role and future involvement of China in counterfeiting and media piracy. With the rise of online media piracy, regulating the Internet would then be the main challenge of law enforcement and copyright owners as regulating the Web to curb piracy would be difficult with legality and illegality becoming more intimately connected with the growing sophistication of technology and with the conflicting business interests between service providers and content providers and between copyright and top IT and ICT industries.