When i was growing up, piracy happened mainly on the radio, by people recording onto tape, the top 40 on a sunday afternoon and then giving copies of the tapes to a friend. Infact, my mum sent a tape over to some of my relatives in Canada, that they still have to this day and guess what... Un-paid music sharing... PIRACY!
In modern day terms of course though, Piracy online is seen as sharing downloadable files, such as games, music, pictures etc and it's a battle the police have been trying to battle for a while, but, failing to win at.
The most recent of these battles was against a website which has long been the target of the police and corporations from around the world. The news hit us all the other day that yet again, the popular download website "The Pirate Bay" had been taken offline and it's servers seized by police. Why? Well, while the pirate bay doesn't actually have anything on it you can download, it does sort of, hook you up with peoples computers which do hold these files, from which, you can then download the item, this is called a peer to peer service, so think of it as the pirate bay was the middle man, you'd tell them what you'd want and they'd see if they knew anyone who had it... to put it in really basic terms anyway.
What is more worrying about this, is that the police and corporations from around the world STILL believe that they can do battle with online piracy as we know it, and win. The truth is, they can't. They will tell us all of how many billions of dollars are lost per year by online piracy, and will sometimes go as far to claim that it causes damage to the industry... the truth is, it doesn't. The movie industry for example, is still worth billions and generates more profit than you'd think... yet they still moan about losing a VERY small percentage of their income to piracy, something along the lines of about 2% of their income.
The truth of the matter is, it doesn't matter how many website's come down, online piracy is going strong. For every website that comes down, theres another 3 popping up in its place. What the movies industry should be doing, along with other industrys, is to work with the piracy industry and make changes!!!!
So, farewell for a while my piratebay friend, you've been amazing and I'm sure the one remaining creator of you that isn't in prison will have you back up and running soon.
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