U.S. failures when it comes to the Gulf of Guinea are many: a failure to address the longstanding concerns of a government watchdog agency, a failure to effectively combat piracy despite an outlay of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars, and a failure to confront corrupt African leaders who enable piracy in the first place.
Because of piracy there has been a massive downturn in people buying music, which makes it more difficult for artists to make money from the sale of records.
I oppose piracy and want to see intellectual property protected because that is what fosters and rewards innovation. But SOPA won't accomplish a meaningful reduction in piracy and causes massive collateral damage to the Internet ecosystem.
Books are so cheap and easy to get that people don't bother stealing them, which is the essential rule of piracy that the music business learned much too late.
Give people what they want, when they want it, in the form they want it in, at a reasonable price, and they'll more likely pay for it rather than steal it. Well, some will still steal it, but I think we can take a bite out of piracy.
The director of the FBI has been visiting Silicon Valley companies asking them to build back doors so that it can spy on what is being said online. The Department of Commerce is going after piracy. At home, the American government wants anything but Internet freedom.
Pirates are the very essence of profit maximising entrepreneurs described in neoclassical economics. Yet, whilst films such as 'The Pirates of the Caribbean' and 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' have gone a long way to popularise both pirates and outlaw behaviour, the truth of the matter is that piracy is illegal, and it kills.
Piracy has destroyed the domestic market.
Warner Bros. has talked about going out with low-cost DVDs simultaneously in China because piracy is so huge there. It will be a while before bigger movies go out in all formats; in five years, everything will.
Online piracy needs to be dealt with itself, because people are just wholesale stealing people's work and not paying for it. It's very hard to figure out a way to fix it.