e Income Tips

Tens of millions of people gamble every day on the internet.

For many, it’s exciting but it’s missing real money. Online gambling for money is not legal in the U.S. but the U.S. Justice Department recently left it up to the states to decide whether or not people can play a ‘real’ and not just a ‘virtual’ hand.

If states legalize online gambling, and then if Zynga, and by association, Facebook, find a way to make it popular there will not only be a new way to play but also hundreds of millions of dollars in new state tax revenue.

Zynga has shown that social gaming can be profitable. If given the chance, it might be the first card played in a new legal world of online gambling.

The US music industry loses $ 12.5 billion (Dh45.88 billion) every year because of piracy, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. The Motion Picture Association of America puts its losses at close to $ 58 billion. And according to the Business Software Alliance, 42 per cent of all software used in the world is pirated — adding up to a total loss of $ 59 billion to the software industry. Piracy seems to have become the bane of content creators, and to put an end to illegal sharing of content on the internet, a US Representative, Lamar Smith, came up with a proposed Stop Online Piracy Act [SOPA]. Another similar act, called the Protect Intellectual Property Act [PIPA], was being proposed in the US Senate, with similar goals. While the acts were aimed at protecting industries and individuals against illegal sharing of their content, the proposals received strong criticism from online companies and users, with fears that it would bring an end to the internet as we know it today. Following protests from companies like Wikipedia and Google, SOPA has been put on hold and a vote on PIPA has been delayed. In this month’s live debate, Gulf News readers delve into the issue of piracy and if the internet needs to be controlled. Post your thoughts on our Facebook pag…………… continues on gulfnews.com