…Piracy! Why are governments and law enforcement agencies putting so much time and effort into stopping it? It will never be stopped as long as the Internet exists, so why bother? There are far more important crimes being committed out there, someone downloading or sharing a few movie files isn’t exactly going to make much difference except to the big corporate companies who have been ripping off the general public for years with over inflated prices on VHS/DVD/CD. I think it’s a case of what goes around comes around, fundamentally it is theft, but you could argue the point that what is being ‘stolen’ doesn’t actually exist as its stored as a series of 0s and 1s. This rant came from this news article on the BBC website about a man in Hong Kong who has been convicted of piracy for sharing three movies, Daredevil, Red Planet and Miss Congeniality. He could face a prison sentence of up to four years and a hefty fine. The way I read this is that you can spend more time in jail for sharing a few movies over the Internet than you could for murder or rape, has the world gone completely mad? If anything the ISPs are to blame for the rise is file sharing as they actively tout downloading of music and movies as a major reason to buy into their broadband packages. The record/movie companies are also to blame keeping prices artificially high to maximise their profits, yet it’s the average ‘Joe’ that is copping the blame and suffering, seems to me that governments are set up to screw the little guy while letting the corporate types run riot, bastards! Back to the file sharing, as I said, it will never be stopped, the P2P networks will evolve all the time to find better more secure ways of file sharing, even closed P2P networks based upon FTP technology. The only way to truly stop file sharing would be to switch off the Internet, if that is at all possible! I really wish that I lived in a Star Trek type universe where money had no value and everything is free, as greed is ruining this planet, and the people on it, and George W Bush is spearheading all this with his lapdog Tony Blair to promote big business to the detriment of the people that put them in power, yet these people put them back in power for another term, why?
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