Internet Piracy
Internet piracy; although it has nothing to do with the swashbuckling scallywags that ride around on big ships and steal and plunder from innocents, the concepts are similar. Online piracy deals with a bunch of different things, be it music, games, movies, documents, or any other online media strata. These pirates, who are often just kids sitting in their rooms downloading music for free, are actually doing more than damage than they know for everyone.
The biggest detriment these pirates do to the world is the hurting of the economy. First of all, the music industry is hit the hardest. These kids and their stealing of the songs means no money for the bands, and without this money, the bands have no motivation or any means to make any new songs. There was a time was CD and record sales were through the roof, and since then, online sales have skyrocketed. Now though, neither is doing well because people are just sharing the music for free on peer to peer networks instead of legally going out and buying it.
Secondly, these kids are ruining movies and music for everyone else. The infamous “leak” is quite a popular thing on the Internet. This is when a new yet to be shown movie, or a new CD somehow appear on the Internet. Everyone scrambles to get it, and even though it is usually taken down quickly, everyone now has the new media on their hard drive. This ruins movie watchers excitement, and often times, is a false alarm. Almost every “bootleg” that surfaces on the net is a hoax, but most people don’t realize it. They then believe that this hoax that was probably quite low budget was the movie they wished to see, and will probably be turned completely off of the movie, only to find it was a fake one they saw and the real movie got flying colors and raving reviews in the newspaper.
Although this Internet piracy represents threats to many different aspects of the world, perhaps the worst hit is towards internet privacy. Piracy is usually done through massive P2P (peer to peer) networks, where one person will post the content and allow everyone else to download it for free. The thing is though, there is no way to know if this content has a virus or possibly multiple ones loaded onto it. There is no way to even tell if the content is named correctly either, as users name it themselves. Perhaps you could find yourself the subject of a “Rick Roll” in which a song you wanted actually turned out to be an eighties’ song by Rick Astely. While slightly this is slightly humorous, a virus crashing your computer or stealing all of your sensitive information is not.
Spencer Hens Says:
Ah Internet piracy, every one does it, but no one will admit it. I am one of those people; I will deny it to the end when talking to my friends or wife, but on the anonymity of a comment function, I will admit I am a complete music pirate. I totally respect bands and the fact that they have to make a living as well, but it seems like they are doing quite well, while the recession has me eating at McDonalds every day. The problem is, on the cheapest of sites (Itunes, Rhapsody, etc.) the songs cost one dollar per song, and this adds up quickly, especially if you buy an entire album. Worst of all, it is charged to a credit card, so you forget how much you have bought after a while and keep spending in a wonderful bliss. Anyway, my main problem with pirating is viruses. It hasn’t happened to me yet, but my friend downloaded what he thought was a song and it turned out to be a virus. I know I’m next, so I’m going to take this article’s advice and be more careful while online.