I don’t think that anyone 50 years ago would have imagined that half the humanity at one point in time will become daylight robbers. They would commit robbery every single day without being caught or convicted. They won’t need to wear face masks, they won’t need to carry guns and they won’t have to kill people and yet they would run away with “goods” worth billions of dollars every day. But then Bill Gates is not 50 years old yet…is he? So we might as well forgive them for their short-sightedness and let’s all lay red carpet for the “Pirates of the 21st century.”
If you are still buying music, video and software from grocery stores, then believe me my friend, either you are “unplugged” or you need to be worshipped. Your name might go down the annals of history for you are one sample of a rare breed that is fast becoming extinct. Every bloody visual, sound, software or a piece of creative writing that ever gets created or was created is out there in the open just a few clicks away from you on the internet. We just have to press a button and we rob, sitting comfortably in our couch. WE are the modern age pirates.
There were good “old” days when some generous people took the pains to buy or set up their own server space and shared Britney Spears, MJ, AeroSmith, Age Of Empires, Bhimsen thumris with the people round the globe without charging them a dime. They were stupid. They were caught and prosecuted. The world took a few revolutions round the sun and what was born was “Napster”. It was intriguing, it was amazing and it was unbelievable. You saw statistics like “3.9 million users, 20.7 million files, 523, 3456 GB shared”. The world had truly come of age and P2P(peer-to-peer technology, which enables the computers around the globe to “talk” to each other on one to one basis) was born. There was no damn song that you wished for, which was not available out there. But the robbery soon got out of proportions and Napster was made to shut down. They did a small mistake; they routed the copyright protected data through their servers and faced the doom. End of the story? No…far from it!
The next generation of P2P software was waiting to be unleashed. The likes of Kazaa, e-Mule and LimeWire came into existence. They had all done their homework. They took care not to go the Napster way. They simply let all the computers in the world do all the talking and sharing with each other without poking their nose. They exist but only to make the machines talk. Are they legal? Good question! Technically they are, since they themselves don’t distribute illegal copies of copyrighted material. It’s the user’s responsibility to ensure that they don’t do so. Smart asses these.! Anybody cared to ask them that who in the world would prefer a jingle that a Tom, Dick or Harry composed himself while he was learning what is A-minor over a copyrighed Brayn Adams song? The US authorities did ask that, forced by the pressure they faced from Hollywood studios since they were the ones taking the maximum hit on their revenues. Many law suites are on the floor since long against Kazaa and likes. End of story.still not!
These guys have a serious limitation when it comes to downloading a large file – say a complete movie. You are often dependent on a single user who is sharing that file for you on his PC. He might decide to go shopping and shut down his PC, only to be kidnapped by some people and never come back to turn his PC on again.:-). And you after painstakingly waiting for a 2GB file to complete are tantalizingly stuck at 83.4%. Let me tell you I hate movies which have the last half hour missing.
So, here came the final nail in the coffin…BitTorrnet. What this smaaaart boy does is that when one shares a large file through this software, it logically and physically splits a file into several small pieces and starts to send out those pieces randomly to different users who are connected to you with the help of this software. Then those people start to trade those pieces amongst themselves through this software. So one is never dependent on a single person for the complete copy after a while and once the copy is out there it gets copied in geometric progression. Through this technique, within a day a single video could be copied by thousands of users.If you have broadband, within 4-5 hours you could have a whole copy of your favourite movie and that too in DVD quality. A true marvel of modern day technology.(Watch this space for a detailed review on BitTorrent). Again BitTorrent itself is not illegal, the content the users share through it could be.
So, with broadband making its way into people’s homes and touching a speed of 100 Mbps in some coutries, what is the road ahead for all the entertainment companies some of which are in real trouble due to internet piracy? For one, they could shut down their shops, go home and start downloading the music themselves.:-) On a more serious note, their only hope rests in a solid legislation acceptable all around the globe which will make a user think twice before clicking that mouse on D/L button. Though laws against cyber crime exist but are very hard to implement because of the truly massive and global scale of this phenomenon. And the problem with technology is that if there was to be some design to cure this, we would have an anti-design the very next day. It looks highly unlikely at the moment to get rid of this “nuisance” which btw I wish would never go away.! Means I don’t mind.:-). Do you?