Theme: Downloading music or movies without paying is as much of a crime as stealing from a store.

          Nowadays in Brazil it is not seen trials involving people who have downloaded music or movies illegally from the Internet, probably because the country doesn’t have the technical knowledge and technology to do something about it. However, when it is thought of countries such as the United States, which does have the two things mentioned previously, there have been some attempts to punish those people, mainly by means of shutting down the websites, which host the illegal contents, along with arresting their owners. I really believe that this approach has not been working as well as it had been thought. As a matter of fact, people just start another website in order to keep up doing the same thing.

        In many cases, those who develop websites, so as to host and illegally spread contents, do it so that they can reach an ideal that they are helping people by turning those contents available. In fact, they usually think that by spreading those contents they are helping the world to achieve a “perfect democracy”, where everybody could have access to everything, e.g., songs, movies, books, scientific papers, etc.

       Sometimes, maybe hardly ever it is different, the website can be just hosting illegal content, but who has been publishing and downloading them is someone else but the website owner. It makes difficult to identify and impose any kind of punishment, because there are lots of people involved. Actually, we would have one of the biggest and most remarkable trials we have ever seen if we tried to punish all of them. Also, the same person who would not even think of stealing something from a store, because of the fear of being caught, would peacefully download something illegally from the Internet, because he/she would feel as if no one would witness his/her actions.

        Finally, the number of people that download/upload illegal content is so big that any kind of approach based on punishment would be ineffective. Even when the police shuts down a website and arrests its owner, almost instantaneously some of its users start another one.

        To sum up, punishing these crimes is, and in the near future still will be, a big problem to deal with, mainly because of the number of people involved and the fact that many products have a digital version that has already been replacing the physical ones. Frankly, I absolutely do not have any idea of how it could be managed, but I really believe that at least one thing should be pointed out. Although it might not suit to every country, I know that, particularly in Brazil, most of people do not earn enough money to spend on things such as books, movies (DVDs, Blu-ray’s), and songs (CDs), and still pay all the main expenditures they have at their homes, e.g., water and energy bills, food, etc. It is not justified to download something illegally just because you cannot afford it, though. It makes us wonder: what if millionaires companies’ owners reduced their products prices and accepted living with less money, which would still be by far more money than ordinary people only can dream of? What if they shared their companies’ profits among their employees so that they (the employees) could afford more products and it would make the money move between hands, that is exactly what we indirectly measure to know about the country’s economic situation?