Piracy and You

Before I do that I would like to say that the more I read about the whole oil spill thing the more I want to just jump onto a table and shout "go to jail" at BP. But I will get to that later, and by later I do mean at a point and time that is closer to never than any sort of immediacy.

Okay then moving on. So I have a moral connundrum. Connumdrum is the wrong word I guess, and I can't spell it so I guess I should find another one. Puzzle I suppose will work. These sorts of things don't happen to me very often, I am a pretty happy go lucky guy and I don't really do grey areas when applied to myself. There is the right choice and the wrong choice and that is about it. I mean it is all pretty simple, don't fuck children, don't kill the neighbor even if he is noisy, and leave those people alone. It is easy. Even the moral puzzles that do crop up are more interesting thought exparaments to me rather than full blown issues which I will wrestle with. The current one being piracy.

I have a funny relationship with piracy. I also love my net book, but seriously the touch pad is a flaming piece of monkey shit. I have no idea how it interpreted my adujusting my writs as emergency broweser window close but it did. Hell you know how Firefox will always ask if you want to save your session? It flew through that too, it did that shit faster than I can do it on purpose. I digress though. Piracy. Before I launch into a high and mighty tirade I would like to point out that at the end of the day I am just a little fuckwad who couldn't give two fucks about intelectual property rights and I just like stuff and I like it better when it is free. Does this hurt my argument? Sure which is why I am not on every pro piracy bandwagon that rolls through.

The thing is though that big buisness are a bunch of dick heads and they don't give a fuck about anything. If they felt they could get away with it the internet would be locked down tighter than a drum and we would be paying for every byte we acess. Wiki would be a subscription based serivce as would youtube, and there would be no more physical media and there would be self deleating data. However, the internet was developed in an acedemic setting not a corporate one so by the time big buisness started getting their mitts on the internet it was already to late. While I loath to make this analogy miners used dynamite to make mine owners listen to them. We are using a slew of internet weapons the least of which is piracy to fight against the sort of people who couldn't possibly care less about you. I feel it is important and by forcing buisneses to compete with piracy some great strides have been made. Steam for example is actually more convient than piracy and at a non retarded price point to boot! The same goes for Netflix, film piracy, paticularly if you wanna burn it to dvd is annoying as fuck and netflix is providing an affordable alternative. People are being shafted in the music department but that is really more their choice than anything else.

Still there are always new doors to kick in and my eyes have been set on two TTC lecture series. One is the philosophy of math and the other is a class on linguistics. Both have roughly 30 one hour lectures and I want these so bad that I can taste it. They are only three hundred bucks a piece too which is actually quite a deal all things considered. Considering the quality of the lectures themselves they are actually cheaper than most college classes. Still I am not spending that much money on them, and both of them are up on pirates bay waiting for me to click the download link. The problem is that TTC is pretty agressive with the whole intelectual property management. The quickest and easiest answer? Use a proxy server. Of course Cox is a little bit bitchy about this, but there is this outfit in Sweeden that promises to get around that for the low low cost of 6 bucks a month. Mostly my concerns are with security so I am off doing some reading on the subject before any risks are taken.

The problem though? The moral problem? Is that this really is doing something that is pretty much wrong. See when I download from a torrent site it is a lot like speeding. Only a small number of offenders are ever caught and chastised because everyone knows that it is kinda silly and there is no way to enforce it. Companies who do care like HBO and TTC will get your internet shut off, and the rest will complain but they will go on their merry buisnesses. The thing about using a proxy server is that I am encouraging a buisness that I am not in favor of. See having my ip adress in the data cloud will show that I have an impeccable taste in movies as well as a willingness to try a wide variety of DS games. But I don't do anything really really wrong I am just publicly sticking it to a bunch of assholes and I won't be doing that for to much longer because Netflix really is more convient than piracy I am swear to you.

But what about bob the child pornographer. See it took me two googles searches and 15 minuts to find some of these services. Which means it might take bob a little longer but he is still going to get it. See these serivices that talk about privacy and all of that? Idealisticly I am behind them all the way. In reality though? The thought of using such a thing horrifies me. The thought that I could download child pornography without fear terrifies me.

Now I know there is always some risk involved but I have always been much more comfortable doing my wrong doings out in the open inviting people to catch me if they actually care. It is just that now for the first time I want something from someone who does give a shit. Which means I am going to have to try. At the same time though the internet is a terrfying place and by giving my money to these people I am making it easier for a child pornographer to get his rocks off.

I am being a little bit mellow dramatic here. I am helping a child pornographer the same way I am killing small buisness when I shop at Walmart. Still maintaining a little bit of fiscal responciblity never did anyone any harm. Also like I said this actual moral conundrum doesn't factor into my actions. The only deciding factor will be how secure these things actually are, they might be full of holes and a pieces of crap. I don't have enough computer knowlage to actually understand the more techincal aspects of the whole thing. Still I mean there is no stopping us. Ubisoft learned that when its ultra retarded DRM for the ds lay cracked within 48 hours of Might & Magics release to the internet and I think the DRM for Assaisn's Creed 2 and Silent Hunter 5 have both been cracked, the new Photoshop is free for the taking, and Maya has been the internet's bitch forever. I don't want a 13,000 dollar 3d animation package though. I just want to learn linguistics and if you think rubbing electornic elbows with a petaphile will stop me then you should know that once to prove a point I graphed a poem.

If I am willing to do that, I am willing to do anything. I am the angel of death Hallelujah.

...Ummm I am going to lay off the sunkist and do some rpg writting where the more terrifying aspects of my personality are but to better use, IE terrorizing my players.