Content Sharing aka File Sharing on Internet OR IP (Intellectual Property) Piracy

Hi Friends,
          After a long gap, I am restarting my blog with the "HOT" topic of Content Piracy or File Sharing. This debate over whether its right or wrong to download files over internet, is the need for time. 

          Every story has two sides, you cannot judge someone or something until you think through all aspects of that issue. The same way, File Sharing (when its utilized for sharing knowledge/ideas) and Content Piracy (when utilized to illegally download the someone's IP over net or something). 

Fast-fact - At any given instant BitTorrent has, on average, more active users thanYouTube and Facebook combined.

          Basically the basic principle of internet is "User is Owner of the Content", so you there is no central control over internet and no one is owner of it, each and every household who is online is basically assisting internet to copy-replicate-transfer some or the other sort of content. 

           First lets look at the brighter side of it (because I am Optimist...), File Sharing Protocols like bittorrent, Napster, Gnutella and Kazaa etc. are a boon to easy-n-faster transfer of any content, you can share content s freely and because of its structure or the way it works, it is not dependent on a single server or machine to host your files. If you want to share something which is really interesting and want others to view, download,  use, improve, redistribute then its the best place to host your files. It represents our right of "Freedom of Speech".

          On the opposite side, there are economical disadvantages for record/film/music industry, and most of the times resulted in lowering album/movie sales/revenues which might result in unemployment for those who work there, artists won't get paid enough, and many more.

          Basically many (mainly young) people want to download music/films for free from internet, they believe that free is good (yeah, off course its good because you are not paying any penny for it but look from the other angle too.) In order to explain this, read this story.

A story about socialism (click this link, to visit Dan Mitchell's blog to read full story), -- (I have copied the story here, in case its not accessible to you). 

"An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had recently failed an entire class. That class had insisted that Obama’s socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.

The professor then said, “OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama’s plan”. All grades will be averaged and everyone will receive the same grade so no one will fail and no one will receive an A…. (substituting grades for dollars – something closer to home and more readily understood by all).

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little.

The second test average was a D! No one was happy.

When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F.

As the tests proceeded, the scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.

To their great surprise, ALL FAILED and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great, but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.
It could not be any simpler than that.

There are five morals to this story:

1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.

2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.

3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.

4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it!

5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation."

So we should protect IP rights, we should respect the their owners, because they must have taken a lot of hard-work to put/create those things. (I know current copy-right laws need to reviewed and rethink upon because currently its not artists or scientists but big-businessman-publishing houses who are mostly benefiting out from it). I am just putting few of my view, everyone is free to think.

There are two documentaries which I saw and which are freely available to download, here are their YouTube/website/Wikipedia links. You can download them over bit-torrent also.

1) Good Copy Bad Copy 
Website - http://www.goodcopybadcopy.net/

2) Steal This Film - 

Wiki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steal_This_Film

Part One (Section One)

 

                                                      

                                                              Part One (Section One)

Part Two

Some gyan (informational links) about file-sharing what does that mean, how it works 

1) P2P File Sharing - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer_file_sharing#Economic_impact

2) How bittorrent works - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent

3) File Hosting Services - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_hosting_service

At last, knowledge should never be held for few privileged ones, it should be free-flowing and easily available to all, without harming creator's right, that's why there is a serious need to rethink upon current business models through which current entertainment industry works.

It should not happen the way current patent wars between big tech giants, they almost have forgot the basic idea behind patents was to encourage innovation and avoid re-inventing the wheel, which they seem to have forgotten. Lets hope for better tomorrow wherein knowledge is no-one's personal property.