Piracy Part 1 - Digital Age

When I was about six or seven my brother and I use to listen to the Top 40 on the radio and we would record it on tape so we could enjoy later. This was in the middle seventies and back then copyright law stated that you could copy content off the radio as you didn't reproduce it and sell it on making a profit. The music industry even back then would have you believe that we were all thieves, of course that would mean everyone who ever owned a tape deck recorder was a thief. The industry have themselves to blame they sold us the tape recorders, VHS recorders, CD writers, DVD writers, USB sticks.

Back then of course the quantity of the content was far lower and for the most part is was purely analogue. You had tape and vinyl, so our ability to share content was limited. Everybody whoever loved music will have at some point in their lives made a tape of their favourite music and passed it on to a friend who loves the same music. This is earliest form of peer to peer sharing.

Then came the digital age and what really kicked it into high gear was the coming of the MP3 file format. It allows you to convert your huge WAV music files down to very small files, it gave you in certain cases a ten to one compression of data. One minute of music recorded in a WAV format would take about ten megabytes whereas MP3 format would be about one megabytes.

Before MP3 players the biggest selling portable player was the Sony Walkman which played tapes and for its size was actually quite small but it was still analogue. The digital age made the Walkman obsolete. One really useful thing about MP3 files is that you can easily add and edit track, artist, album and comments data using free software like Winamp, gone are days of pieces of paper with your tracks hand written on them. MP3 players will read the ID3 tag data and display it for you.

I have somewhat digressed from the point I am trying to make and that is in the digital age the quantity of content has increased exponentially so and our ability to share.

The music industry made an estimated thirty to forty billion dollars in 2004, the film industry averaged from cinema ticket sales alone a whopping ten billion for the last three years. Both industries have stated that they lose about 1.5 percent in piracy. They state that this is based upon single downloads from peer to peer sharing sites, they also state that this piracy will collapse the industries. A somewhat grandiose and stupid claim if you ask me.

Now of course some of these profits will go back into the industries as an investments but where is the rest going? They will spending money on lobbying the different countries round the world to put in place Nazi style restrictions upon peer to peer networking sites and then eventually the Internet will become the police state that was fictionalized by George Orwell in his book 1984.

And this is to recover that 1.5 percent! Greed really doesn't cover it!

Most people download films and music purely because they want to watch/listen to them first before they buy it. Effectively peer to peer sites are the biggest form of free advertising that these industries will ever get. 1.5 percent is didley over squat for this type of advertising.

If I download a film, burnt it to DVD and then made copies of the DVD and sold it as new on eBay or the town market. That is true piracy and people that do that are stealing, they have crossed the line of sharing. These are the true pirates!

PS. I hear they making a remake of The Taking of Pelham 1,2,3.  You cannot improve upon the original with  Walter Matthau and the character 'Harold Longman' was brilliant to a tea. I mean to almost make it but be ruined by a simple sneeze.