A significant portion of this article comes from the following source: Elton, Serona. Graduated responses to online piracy: Approaches taken in the United States and around the world. In Music and Law (Sociology of Crime, Law and Deviance, Volume 18), edited by Mathieu Deflem. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2013. 37-58. ISBN: 978-1-78350-036-9IntroductionOnline piracy is a huge threat to all of the copyright industries. The copyright are described in the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) 2012 study on the Economic Contribution of Copyright-Based Industries as industries which are dependent on copyright and related rights protection.1 These include music as well as motion picture, press and literature, software, and others. Online piracy refers to the sharing of content, such as recorded music, movies, ebooks, and computer programs in violation of copyright laws (i.e., illegally), via the internet. According to a recent New York Times editorial, online piracy is growing by leaps and bounds.2 The article cites a powerful statistic from Cisco Systems' Visual Networking Index indicating that over onefourth of all internet traffic is generated by the use of peer-to-peer and cyberlocker sites, and most of the activity involves illegal file sharing.3 Unlike a typical website where a visitor is able to view content hosted on the website's computer server, like iTunes, peer-to-peer file sharing networks enable individuals on the network to share their files with other individuals on the network without the use of an intermediary or central computer server. Cyberlockers provide the ability for a user to store digital files on servers operated by the Cyberlocker provider. Their use becomes problematic when the particular service includes tools that enable the widespread sharing of files among its users. A study by Stephen Siwek at the Institute for Policy Innovation indicates that the annual losses in the United States relating to sound recordings alone number around US$12.5 billion.4 However, the economic losses resulting from online piracy are difficult to quantify precisely. The U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO) has indicated that this is due to the illicit nature of the activity and the reliance on assumptions to estimate what purchasing activities consumers would engage in if they were not obtaining the goods illegally. However, the GAO did find that the problem is sizeable and concerning.5 Even some critics of the various economic studies which have attempted to quantify the size of the problem agree that, through the eyes of the copyright industries, it is seen as a serious problem worthy of significant effort and attention.6 Efforts to combat online piracy in the United States have been underway since the late 1990s. Some approaches have proven more successful than others. One of the more recent approaches is the so-called graduated response, which involves rights holders, and internet service providers (ISPs) and their subscribers.Early History of Online Piracy in the United StatesThe technological seeds of online piracy today were planted as early as 1988, when the Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG) was created as a working group of the International Standards Organization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), for the purpose of developing standards for digital audio and video compression. Within the MPEG, a sub-group focused on audio was formed. After just over four years of work, the MPEG-1 standard was published around the beginning of 1993. Within the MPEG-1 standard, Audio Layer 3 was the ability to compress high quality audio CD data by a factor of 12 while maintaining a high quality audio sound.7 This form of compression became known as MP3. In 1994, the first MP3 encoder software, L3enc, was released by the Fraunhofer Institute (FI), followed in 1995 with the first MP3 decoder (player) software, WinPlay3. …
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May 1, 2019
Kerry O Ferris 
Open Access