Web Piracy
Posted on Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 at 9:26 am
The past weeks a whole soap opera evolved from the actions of Stichting Brein vs The Pirate Bay. The short version:
TPB: we have been brought to court in Sweden. Great injustice!
SB: TPB accomodates crime. Dutch websurfers need to be protected.
*SB sues TPB*
Today, on my work, something like this happened:
Collegue: I bought a new phone with a navigation system.
Me: Well, just be careful to check. My mum bought one of those and they didn’t tell her you had to pay loads of extra money to download the navigational charts.
Colleague: Oh, if that’s the case I’ll just download an illegal version.
It was said so casually, it seemed this person did not even consider the fact it would be the same as tucking it under its coat and walking out of a store with it.
It’s available online for free, so it can’t be illegal. Something like that.
And almost all my colleagues, average, polite, decent human beings, seem to think about it the same way. They have no awareness of digital property. It’s bits and bytes, it’s not an object.
I don’t think shutting down torrent sites will have the desired effect. The only beneficial effect I can think of is that it’s a stimulus to invent and develop new ways of exchanging files.
So, it’s not as much the p2p and the torrents which are the problem, it’s the way people perceive ownership when the object is on a computer.
Should this change?
