Internet Piracy

If a contractor builds a road, is it his job to ensure no one speeds on it?

When Boeing builds a plane, is it their job to ensure the pilot knows how to fly it?

When the electric company provides me electricity is it there job to ensure I don’t use it to torture people?

No, so why is it that the recording (Music and Movie) business thinks that ISPs should police the internet connection of it’s users?

Especially when it has failed so dismally to identify the wrong doers. The tools they use to find file sharers are so inefficient that they routinely get the wrong people over and over again.

I whole heartedly agree that piracy is wrong, Napster was definitely an illegal service, but now we get into the more common utility called BitTorrent.

BitTorrent has a lot of legitimate uses. For years it has been used to share installations of Linux and free software, where the developers can afford or can’t maintain a main server, they can share the load of distribution with their user base.

Now however there is more on BitTorrent, there is music, movies, TV, software. Much of this is copyrighted material, but who is at fault with this music, the guy that makes it available or the guy that downloads and uses it.

I have in the past used BitTorrent a lot, I own 200 or so DVDs, I like to take my DVDs with me on long flights and watch them on my iPod, I could break the law and rip a DVD, convert it, compress it and copy it to my iPod, or….. I could download the one someone else did already, it would take a couple of hours still but the computer takes care of it. Essentially I have used the download to save time, making a copy of things I already own. Similarly for music, if I have a CD I have bought it is often easier to download it for my iPod than copy it.

I do want to make it clear though that anything I downloaded I owned. I want to support the industry to make more, I do not feel I should have to buy it twice for the privilege though.

So the guilty party isn’t the person sharing the files, surely it is the one using it without the appropriate license.

Why the recording industry can’t get that into their heads I don’t know.

How’s this for an idea, when I buy a product I get a license code. That license code can then allow me to download the music as well as have the CD. Same with DVD, when I buy the DVD I get a code, the code then lets me download it as DVD format, iPod Format, PC Format, whatever?

I guess the problem with this is the people that WANT everything for free, maybe if people could be educated that product has value they wouldn’t be so inclined to steal. Then again, we have a world full of bank robbers that still haven’t learned that.

Still asking the ISP to police what I do is not their job.

On a side note……

Where do the ISP’s get off deciding which programs I should use at what speeds. They say I can have web access at 100% speed but BitTorrent they are going to limit to 50% of the speed. If I buy “Kilobytes per second” from you, you should not be looking at what is in the Kilobyte and slowing me down because of it.

Time to support net-neutrality where you live