Copyright infringement. The ultimate ethical wrong that some of us may do in our lives without thinking of it. After all, that is what humans do – do things without thinking of the effect on other people. But I digress…
Copyright infringement means, split into the two words, as follows:
- Copyright – a set of exclusive rights given to people like you and I for a time period to copy/redistribute, sell, adapt, perform/display publicly, sell/assign copyright, transmit/display publicly, the way that an idea is expressed if it can be fixed in a tangible medium.
- Infringement – violation of a right
So…. copyright infringement means to violate copyright. There are limitations on copyright designed to protect people, but we will not discuss these here.
Some examples of copyright infringement are…
- Copying a Windows XP CD and giving it away to another person.
- Illegally downloading music or software from the Internet
Why is copyright infringement morally wrong?
Let’s say that you make a CD of YOUR OWN ORIGINAL music and sell it for $20. A person buys it from you. Then he copies your CD onto 1 million CD-Rs and sells those CD-Rs for $40 per CD or $20 for 10 CDs. Is this fair? What about the time and effort you put into making the music?
Let’s see this in detail:
I will assume that the person has bought 10,000 100-packs at a cost of $55.99 each. The total cost is $559,900. There is practically zero cost for copying CDs, but it does take a lot of time:
Assuming that your CD-RW drive records at 52x (52 times 150 kilobytes/second, which equals 7,800 kilobytes/second or ~7.62 megabytes/second) and that your CD is 700 MB, it will take, for ONE CD, ~92 seconds or 1 minute and 32 seconds. Multiplying that by a million CDs tells us that it will take a total of 2 years and 10 months
If this person sold ALL of these 1,000,000 CD-Rs (where half of all sales are for 10 CDs), this means that:
- One person bought one CD at $40. That’s a profit of $20. Multiply the profit by 500,000 CDs – the answer is $10,000,000 profit.
- Another person bought 10 CDs at $20. That sounds like a loss of $20, but it’s not. Per CD, that is 50 cents. Multiply that by 50,000 CDs – $25,000 profit. The rest of the CDs may seem to exist – but they don’t. Recall that these are TEN CDs being sold. 500,000 CDs divided by 10 CDs equals 50,000.
The net profit is $10 million plus $25k minus nearly $6k = STILL NEARLY TEN MILLION DOLLARS! You can subtract the $25k instead of adding if you want to, but either way, it is still nearly $10,000,000.
