The law and companies openly claim that piracy
does no good; the opinion of the companies is bound to be obvious
since they're concerned about sales; this's similar to a politician
saying the other party is bad and they are good.
However I've a different approach to this.
The no. 1 beneficial of piracy is the end user;
it's tempting to download something which has a market price of $200
(or even $4000) for free by just paying for your Internet connection.
This's beneficial in another way to the end
users – the companies wont hike up prices like crazy, cause if
they did people wouldn't simply buy their product, bankrupting the
company. This works specially well with monopolies like Microsoft and
Adobe, otherwise your copy of Windows would start at $500 forcing you
to pay it if you wanna use a computer, maybe people had to pay in
installments cause of this.
Piracy controls the prices of these software to be
reasonable; and if it is, people will not even download pirated
instead buy software/movie/album; there's a critical price at which
the profit will be maximum. Every businessman knows that.
Equalize distribution of finance – If
piracy stops, the rich will get richer; people will be forced to pay
for their movies and software breaking the distribution of the
economy. Economy is good when everyone has money instead of all money
being at one hand; this makes a more of a 1 man rule instead of
democracy. Thus stopping piracy completely is bound to do harm.
Following the above stated facts of increased
rates of multimedia/software, it'll make the conditions still worst
since the price will also be a lot higher which means more profits.
Next comes ISP – they're rather silent on
this cause they know it's not good, but good for them. More
downloading means more work for ISP, and more profits. Clear and
simple.
The pirates – Traffic to a website with
ads generates revenues, that's why there're so many websites offering
pirated content.
crackers – You know Windows infection.
Pirated stuff and websites is one of the best sources of these. Then
with compromised Windows systems comes spam > fraud and stolen
private content. I believe, in Bittorrent networks, crackers attack
Windows computers to compromise them.
Antivirus companies – If the world didn't
have piracy of any kind the probability of you having infection
(though a pendrive, or the Internet) will be very less; thus less
work for antivirus companies and less profit. On the other hand, it's
a bad idea to download pirated antivirus software cause it might be
infected and with the level of access the infected antivirus software
has in your system, your PC can turn into a bot and you can turn to
another Windows victim.
Software companies – This might be hard
to believe, but if a software comes free of cost a lot of people are
willing to adopt it making a monopoly of the software, transforming
it into a de-facto standard simply cause everyone can afford it.
This's popular is countries with poor cyber laws or bad enforcement
of the same. If piracy wouldn't have been there, Windows and Adobe
wouldn't have a monopoly in Asia, Africa, South America, and some
countries of Europe (I'm not sure about EU) cause people couldn't
afford these software; they are less willing to 'buy' a software,
instead they would've simply used free alternatives even if they were
less in features (like Gimp, Blender instead of Autodesk or Adobe
products). Thus, even though Microsoft and Adobe claim they wanna
kill piracy, they also know doing so will take away their monopoly,
and if this monopoly breaks in one country, it'll break worldwide.
This's the last thing MS wants – they solely rely on their monopoly
for revenues, otherwise there's no reason to buy any rubbish MS
product.
Also, as I've stated before in this Blog, propriety software is bound to always do harm to the masses in the long run. Similarly, software companies too claim that piracy harms people in the long run but they ignore the fact that they are themselves doing harm to the world by 'selling' their propriety software. So software companies are loudmouth on piracy and silent when it comes to dealing with disadvantage of selling their monopolistic software. I smell politics here.
Also, as I've stated before in this Blog, propriety software is bound to always do harm to the masses in the long run. Similarly, software companies too claim that piracy harms people in the long run but they ignore the fact that they are themselves doing harm to the world by 'selling' their propriety software. So software companies are loudmouth on piracy and silent when it comes to dealing with disadvantage of selling their monopolistic software. I smell politics here.
Ground truth is, most companies want money and
they'll do anything to get it, they're least concerned about people
and lie to the public that piracy is bad for everyone not cause they
care about people, but care only about money. Here I'm writing how
it's not.
Helping the poor
– Although poor people do not deserve too much entertainment, but
what's the use depriving the same when you know they can't/won't buy
it?
The concept lies by
the fact that, if you know that your multimedia/software will never
be bought by Alex, why not give it to um for free? There's no harm to
the vendor/producer and no harm and benefit to the end user (since
the end user won't give you a buck for it till the infinitely of time
– nothing can be gained form um).
Search engines – No piracy means less
things to search on the Internet, which also means less use of search
engines. That's why Google is silent on this, and if they do apply
preventive measures, it's usage will downgrade exponentially like the
case with Bing, Yahoo. There're plenty of search engines to search
the same content in.
File hosting businesses – Want to
download your free movie faster? Join today!! Although a report abuse
might remove the video within a few days, but a lot of stuff goes
unnoticed, so you 'joining in' will still reap benefits off their
database of pirated stuff.
It's unnecessarily to mention that a lot of
revenues of the likes of rapidshare, 4shared etc... comes from
piracy.
So what should be done?
The current state should remain the same.
Piracy shouldn't persist in real life – it's
easy to get that cop after that pirate and teach um a lesson; this's
done in most developed nations.
Now, the question lies what can be done online?
Many governments like that of the US of A will
even go forward to crush people's fundamental rights to make
Hollywood richer (or maybe with the intention of extracting more tax
from them, no one else benefits); this method is similar to China's –
a communist nation which uses the same tactics to crush rebels
instead of piracy.
If countries adopt for it, they won't be letting
access to sites hosting pirated stuff; so what will be the difference
remaining between this country and China? China prevents people from
outside it to gather information and form a thinking to rebel again
the government – this's a solid reason to restrict access to
information which would otherwise be a thread to the government as a
whole; but doing the same just to make the likes of Madonna, James
Cameron, Spielberg and Clooney to become richer from what they
already are seems like an excuse.
What guarantee do you take that instead of
blocking just piracy sites, they start blocking anti-government sites
too? If they do, how will you know?
Blocking any kind of information from entering a
country could be one of the reasons for a country to be taken over by
a dictator, seeing this threat, it's sheer stupidity to do such a
thing to make the rich Hollywood richer.
On the other hand if the producer is intelligent
and better than one of those management/finance guys, he can seal his
IP from piracy if he ponders a bit harder to understand what I mean.
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