This website can create a fake identity for many purposes. It includes everything, including blood type, phone number and username. All of this is fake, so there isn't anything shady and illegal on here.
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Friday 10 March 2017
Sunday 5 March 2017
Piracy: Good or Bad?
In early 2014, The Pirate Bay was seized by the Swedish government due to a complaint by a Swedish anti-piracy group. The Pirate Bay is a popular pirating website (ranked the 89th most popular website on the internet) where users can download and post music, TV shows, video games, movies, documents, and more for free using a peer to peer file sharing system called BitTorrent. The site has been in legal trouble many times before, one in early 2009 where the original owners: Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, and Gottfrid Svartholm were all charged with copyright infringement, fined 46 million kronor ($6 822 856 CAD, split up and divided between a number of corporations) and were sentenced to one year in a medium security prison (which was then shortened). This trial was one of the most serious file sharing trials to date. Which leads to a question: Should illegal downloading sites be punished this seriously and is it fair to do so? For this post, I will focus on pirating music, but TV shows and movies are similar.
When you buy a CD, buy an album or song off of iTunes, or stream music from a music streaming service such as Google Play Music, Spotify, or Tidal, a portion of the price you paid or a set price is paid to the artist (Even if you bought a CD or cassette from a garage sale, the original buyer paid the artist through the purchase). When you pirate music by torrenting it (quick note, a common misconception is that torrenting in and of itself is illegal when it isn't, and in fact, some visual artists, video game developers, artists, and bands use it to distribute their work) and or streaming it illegally, you are taking earned money from them. Pirating media on the internet is very popular, due to its ease and distribution. It is not hard to find a torrent of your favorite album or a whole band's discography on websites such as The Pirate Bay. The pop creates a downwards shift in revenue for artists. While they try to make up for it by distributing merchandise and touring, the albums should be their main revenue. This can also decrease record label revenue and can lead to some pretty desperate things that aren't good for the artist, the record label, and you.
Everyone who uses the computer semi-regularly at the least and has an internet connection has pirated some sort of media at least once. Again, it's easy and efficient but the loss of money going to the artist, if big enough, can cause problems for the artist and or record label. If this problem was transferred to the real world, it would be like stealing a CD or any other physical copy of the music, on a massive scale.
Which then goes back to my question: Should illegal downloading sites be punished seriously and is it fair to do so? If what happened to TPB was serious, then no, at least not quite. The people who run these sites are not terrorists, nor they want the world to burn, they believe in a completely free world without these laws, and they create these sites to give free things out to everyone. I don't agree with adding prison time, but what I do agree with morally is the amount of money they were fined and gave to the owners because that money is pretty much owed to the corporations and record labels who distribute the media the owners distributed illegally.
The reason it took so long to charge them (TPB was created in 2003 and the owners were charged 2009) was because their identities were concealed and users only knew them by their usernames: brokep (Peter Sunde), TiAMO (Fredrik Neij), and anakata (Gottfrid Svartholm). The fact that concealing identity is easy on the internet can lead to very illegal things being done that harm another person, or worse being done. Pirating is morally and obviously bad, but many do it. A good reason is, on the surface, it isn't bad, in fact, it's quite awesome. Free music? Heck yeah! But if you go deeper, it causes problems as you read above that can outweigh the good it can give, depending on how you look at things.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay
http://uk.businessinsider.com/the-pirate-bay-cofounder-fredrik-neij-worth-prison-time-for-torrent-site-2015-7
http://uk.businessinsider.com/the-pirate-bay-cofounder-fredrik-neij-worth-prison-time-for-torrent-site-2015-7
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