The Internet has had and will continue to have a profound effect on society. It is hard to imagine life without such technologies as computers, cell phones, gaming devices, and so on. The Internet, World Wide Web, and their associated technologies have altered our social and personal experience of the world. In no other time in history have we had such access to knowledge and raw information. One can search the Library of Congress, the Louvre in Paris, and read online books and articles or watch videos from just about any country in the world. We can interact and chat with friends down the street, in another state, or half way around the globe. The world is now our neighborhood. We are a “wired” society who lives a significant amount of our life online and tethered to technology.

While few realize it, at any given moment the world is full of pirates! In fact, many people reading this may actually be members of that group themselves, without even knowing it. It doesn’t take much to become what many would consider a pirate— downloading a commercial movie, copying a few sentences from the Internet without a citation, posting a popular song to a hosting site, or even just raiding an unsuspecting cargo ship for treasu—Wait... wrong variety of pirate (although there is a connection, which will be discussed later). Anyway, by engaging in any number of those kinds of activities, millions of Internet users have become pirates— often without realizing that they have done something which can be considered wrong or illegal. Included here is an explanation of what digital piracy is, an overview of the history of piracy and copyright, descriptions of the technologies used for digital piracy, and—most importantly—how Internet users can safely share files and publish media online.