The entertainment industry is no longer fighting the losing battle of global piracy alone: the U.S. government is now said to be joining forces to stop the proliferation of ripped-off content
distributed on the Web for free. And what, exactly, is the U.S. government going to do? Urge foreign governments to crack down on piracy, or they "risk incurring trade barriers," the
Washington
Post says. Last year, efforts to crack down on piracy in Sweden worked out; Sweden changed its laws, made it a crime to swap copyrighted content, and Swedish authorities were able to shut down
several illegal file-sharing sites. Russia, meanwhile, is unable to--or refusing to--comply with U.S. demands to shut down an unauthorized file-sharing site, which the U.S. says places its bid to
enter the World Trade Organization in jeopardy. U.S. companies lost an estimated $250 billion per year to Web piracy, as anything from movies to music to video games can be easily ripped off and
distributed for free on the Internet. The Post says that such entertainment exports, worth 6 percent of our GDP, are as important to the U.S. economy today as autos, steel, and coal were to
yesterday's. Unfortunately, the government and the RIAA and MPAA just don't have the infrastructure or the resources to win this battle. If you shut one down, another two spring up. Frankly, it's not
unlike the War on Drugs--you can keep numbers down perhaps, but there's no winning this war.
Read the whole story at Washington Post »
