The demand for new music and the urgency to obtain it by any means possible has led to an increase in online piracy. Many choose to take advantage of online media hosting sites rather than purchasing physical copies of new music, or purchasing anything at all. Sometimes people find themselves in the situation where if they could choose to download an album at full price or download it for free with the risk of catching a virus, getting the virus is less of a concern to them. Say no to plagiarism. Get a Custom Essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get an Original EssayWhen you think about it, piracy has been around longer than we think. Whether it's transferring music from a cassette to a blank cassette or burning an album for a friend onto a disc, it's still considered illegal copyright. Online music sharing has a rather negative impact on CD sales, vinyl sales and even online sales through websites like Amazon and iTunes. As a result, the music industry has suffered significant financial losses and has attempted to combat pirates with legal action, but these can never be completely stopped as many people download illegal media in the States alone. -United. the sites are gradually being repressed. Most recently, MegaUpload.com, a popular media sharing site, was shut down in May this year. MegaUpload was known as a "cyber locker", a website created with different sources for uploading and streaming files by its 50 million daily users, like the original Napster.com which was the first file sharing website on the Internet. It was launched in 1999 and was closed by court order in 2001. (Parlof) According to the prosecution, the operators of MegaUpload made more than $175 million in illegal profits and caused damage estimated at $500 million. dollars to copyright owners. (Fritz) Many attempts at copyright prevention have been made. In most cases, they increase the risk of being arrested and prosecuted for piracy, even for a short time. Sweden's copyright protection reform, launched in April 2009, reduced Internet traffic by 18% over the next six months. It also increased sales of physical music by 27 percent and digital music by 48 percent. (Liang and Adermon) This shows that the only way to prevent online piracy is to scare away the people who participate in it. The last major attempt to try to stop online piracy came in January 2012, the suggested "Stop Online Piracy Act" or SOPA. SOPA would have been used to prevent unauthorized information from leaking to places where it shouldn't. Internet service providers would block access to certain websites and the law would expand existing criminal laws to include unauthorized dissemination of copyrighted content, granting a maximum penalty of up to five years in prison . (Band) SOSA was not adopted due to the great threat that American citizens felt posed to their Internet security. Internet companies would be able to monitor user activity much more closely. (Maybe too close.) Many disagree with this. Many sites are trying to avoid lawsuits by taking an even more creative approach to sharing free music. Instead of hosting music directly on their personal site, they will link to multiple cyber locker websites containing the files the user is looking for. These..