Pirating!!! Bad...

Brazil/US pirating

When thinking of pirating movies and music, one of the first things that come to my mind is the difference of how a society or laws deal with it in different countries. In Brazil I have never heard of people being charged or being fined for downloading things on-line. Pirating in Brazil consist of different things than here. In Brazil the law states that it is not pirating if you are downloading something for your personal use, but if you are making profit directly or indirectly it is against the law. So that means that downloading music and burning a CD will not be acknowledged as pirating, now if you sell that CD or play it in a party without paying for the right you can be arrested. Here in the US just downloading music is a crime, and they can find out who is doing it, especially at colleges and companies or private networks.

In your face/or not

In Brazil it really astounds me how many people we can see selling pirate DVDs and CDs on the street. In the big cities it is really common to have a specific place where those people go to sell pirate products. They do it in plain sight, and when the police are coming you here all these scream and warnings, running everywhere and all of a sudden the streets where they sell their products are empty. Here in the US I have never seen or heard of such thing happening. I believe because it is such an easy thing to do, people in Brazil with lower incomes decide to go into this kind of thing just to make an extra income for their families. I believe it is something bad, but still not as bad as dealing with drug, guns and gangs. I believe that this is one of the factors that make so many things different from my country to this one, money.



The ad says:
You would never steal a car
You would never steal a purse/bag
You would never steal a movie
Buy pirate DVDs is stealing.

My point of view

In Brazil I would burn CDs all the time, downloading music and putting into my i-pod was something my friends and I would do like it was no big deal. Although I downloaded music I have never downloaded a movie or bought a pirate CD or pirate movie. I do not agree with buying these products. First my dad is a producer from an independent label. I know how hard it is for him to create a CD, the time, love, care and hard work that he puts into it. For someone to just come along and start selling that same CD for half the price is ridiculous. It is inconsiderate and stupid. For movies I believe is even more ridiculous. I love going to the movies, and if there is something I really want to see and it hasn’t come out yet I will just wait to see it in the big screen. I won’t go buy a pirate one so that I can watch on a regular TV with regular sound. Again the money has a lot to do with it. I say that because I have the money to buy a real DVD, to go to the movies or buy a CD. Other people simply don’t have the money, and while a DVD at a store can go up to twenty dollars (currency changed) people can buy pirate DVDs for as low as a dollar and fifty cents.

Surprise

I looked up some news on pirating, and it actually made me pretty scared. Here in America a girl got a fine of a hundred thousand dollars for downloading a hundred and thirty three songs. Other boys and girls that go to colleges that gave a system where they can identify who is downloading illegally also were fined. It also surprised me the amount of people in America that do illegal downloads, I thought it would be a lot less since is something that can be so expensive if you are caught. More than twenty five million people on the on-line population have already downloaded a full length movie.