The real value is in the rights and the creativity that they protect. The international recording industry is driven by dynamism and enterprise, but these would be meaningless in a world of inadequate copyright protection. Record companies invest billions of dollars of the industry's total worldwide revenues in new artists, many of whom will never prove commercially successful. It is this culturally diverse bedrock of investment in new talent that weak copyright protection hurts most. There are many different terms for it, but unauthorised copying and dissemination of copyrighted works is theft, pure and simple.
Pirates are the enemy of creativity and all creators.
Piracy is the illegal copying of sound recordings, typically for financial gain. Pirates thrive on weak copyright laws as well as on poor law enforcement. In today's global economy, counterfeiters and other pirates are able to seek out havens of poor copyright protection and ineffective anti-piracy enforcement. The advent of the mass-produced CD has changed the face of piracy from a problem largely confined to local borders to a sophisticated international trade. A new era of piracy on the internet poses potentially even greater problems than the proliferation of CD piracy.