The Pros and Cons of Piracy

Piracy - A 6 letters word that describes the free & illegal usage or sharing of content like music, movies, games and applications and many more digital stuff. It’s obviously correct to say that there are more people who prefer piracy than paying for the original content. I would like to add that Piracy in any smaller or even smallest form is completely illegal until the owner of the content enables you to do so. Many debates and acts have been passed since independence of many countries to protect the goods of original authors and producers but still we are choosing piracy over becoming a legit customer. Have you ever thought why it is so? I have thought about piracy this week and today I am here to present some facts about piracy, why it so done and why people prefer piracy over becoming a legit customer. Let us start with different types of content of which piracy is done by us.

Piracy and Movies

 As you can see the above image depicts the bad truth of piracy. People can watch movies in three ways and 2/3 people prefer the pirate mode to watch movies. It’s obvious that who wants to pay hard earned money for watching a movie when he/she can do the same by downloading it for free! One more point to note is why should one book a ticket for the movie standing in a long queue and then get disappointed by listening that “The show is houseful man!” The quality of choice depends on the nature of the person as shown in the above image. In modern time, these are the three ways to watch movies but we can't forget the fourth one and that is DVDs. So will piracy still win even now, let's see the results of what happens when you buy a pirated DVD and an original DVD:

1.     It is very much affordable being around $1 whereas the original movie DVD may cost you $8 to $10

2.     The pirated DVD is available in the market within one week of the release of movie and the original DVD takes some three to four months to do so.

3.     Pirated DVD will come along with several other movies released on the same weekend, so you pay for one and get four to five movies extra for free which makes more time pass but on the other hand you will get the specific movie in the original DVD you purchase, In some cases you may get bonus soundtracks too, but who needs them?

4.     The pirated DVD will be prone to Fakeness and the DVD used to burn are of serious low quality, so your DVD can be easily damaged by just making a few scratches, but on the other hand the original DVD will be placed in a very good looking plastic case and the DVD used too will have better life and stability to play on almost all DVD players.

5. And look at the below Image, it will tell you how good is a pirated DVD than Original One.

After reading the above four facts, it’s obvious that piracy won. While buying a new thing we check for its advantages first and then its price tag. In India its different, here people prefer the price tag first. In spite of low quality, one would prefer choosing a pirated DVD as it is damn hard to wait and watch the FTW movies. Pirates Win again, Arrr. And why the Fu*k should one wait for these FTW movies, instead become a new generation modern pirate and goto any torrent site and watch that movie in Full HD 1080p Blu Ray quality after some time depending on the internet connection, as easy as that and this method is completely free of cost.

Piracy and Songs

Listening to sings is everyone's favorite time pass. Everyone has his/her favorite singer and downloads his songs whenever a new album comes out in the market. B!tch please, album, market, what are you talking about, we download these songs ASAP and share them like viruses using Blue Tooth. This is in fact another true story as it is very hard to find a person paying for music. We are living on earth where songs can be downloaded by just Googling the song's title. iTunes is a word that most of the Apple users know. iTunes is an online marketplace where you can buy songs in digital form to enjoy them on your Apple based device. The main purpose of iTunes is to provide high quality songs in digital form. Nearly all international artists sell their songs on iTunes as it is easier to buy songs rather than buying albums from Music stores. But we are talking about piracy and piracy is still rocking here in iTunes. Just Google your song's name and add iTunes rip and you will get the best quality of that sing in M4A format (MP4 Audio). And no problem if you want to get the album of your favorite artist, just search for it in Pirate-bay and the album will be playing on your device after few minutes. Right now while writing this post I am too listening to an iTunes Rip song :p

Piracy and Games

Games are games and they do not need any description. Every child from age of 5 years like games and the craze for PC games arises as soon as he becomes a teenager. Nowadays games are becoming more and more addictive with the introduction of new techniques and gaming hardware. Usually a hardcore PC game will cost you around $45 to $50 or maybe much more than that. How can one afford these price tags. This gave arise to Game Rips and now everyone could enjoy that game easily for free. If you do not have an internet connection, you can get your favorite game within $2 and enjoy the game easily. And if you have an unlimited Internet plan then you are living in heaven, provided that you have a good configuration gaming PC. The image below defines the goodness of piracy of games. The first one shows you that you do not need to spend many bucks in order to get the game but only a few and the second image shows "How you can save environment by piracy." Well as a matter of fact, it helps indirectly in saving our environment. The only thing bad in the pirated games is the usage of cracks and sometimes, these cracks can be virus instead and harm your computer severely, so think twice before using a cracked game.

Piracy and Websites

Piracy is also performed for web content too. Here web content means articles, codes and and piracy is related with copying and sharing of content without giving proper credits. Many newbie bloggers are too lazy so they copy-paste articles from other top blogs and publish them on their own blog. But a recent change in Google search engine's algorithm, the spam blogs are being penalized for doing it by stopping the organic traffic. I am too aware of it and though every content you see on my blog is completely made from scratch, making me the respective owner of it and when needed I put credits for images used. I am good guy while blogging and hate piracy most because I have found some people that republish my posts without giving proper credits. Even I have filed cases against these spammer webmasters and bloggers and finally I won and Google deleted their posts. If you are a blogger, then I strongly recommend you to make your own original content to get more traffic from Google and respect from your readers. With respect to piracy, not only content is ripped but codes are too. For example: A Blogging site released a widget named "Mashable Styled Social Subscription Widget" which when added displays a social sidebar (just like the famous social blog Mashable.com) in the blog looking beautiful and organized at the same time. The site here I am talking about is www.Way2blogging.org by Harish Dasari. Now his widget can be found in almost all blogging blogs and they do not even give credits to him. But again, good guy Google has rewarded him for his hard-work by increasing his website's organic traffic and rankings. So I request you again that make sure you do not become a pirate if you are a blogger by passion. 

The Truth Behind Piracy and Who Feels the Pain of it

It is obvious that Piracy is a good thing for all those poor guys with low pocket money and piracy helps them to enjoy the goodness of new era of digital media. Piracy on the other hand also a nightmare of the creators of media. Well they are hating piracy as it ruins their profit and also the money that they should be getting from their hard-work. A normal person will not fell its guilty for piracy but when you will create your own games and music, you will come to know how bad it feels when you see someone copying your content. It is obvious that many of us are not the original content creators but when it comes to blogging, there are many people who earn their livelihood from it. Nowadays every wants to be a blogger and when he reaches the success and finds that people are copying his/her posts, he feels very sad and angry. So he will take legal help from major service like DMCA and take-down the copy-paster. What will happen if you are found pirating any music, game or movie and someone takes it seriously and calls police to your home? I know this is not impossible as there are many pirates in the world and the recovery from piracy will take around 50 to 60 years acc. to me. The same thing is done by some protest groups recently and the results were satisfactory. I am talking about the shutdown of huge pirated file sharing site Mega-Upload. The site has been closed down previously and the founder has been arrested. Not only this, But the torrent site ThePirateBay's founder has been arrested some days ago too. Looks like that the content creators are enough serious this time. Let’s look some more cases of Piracy.

Torrent Sites Case of Indian Govt.

The torrent sites were blocked for a while by the Indian government by seeing the loss in earning of producers done by torrent giants like The Pirate’s Bay and Kickass torrents and also the free video sharing site Vimeo that kicks off the copyrights problem. The ban continued for a period of some weeks and then the ban was removed automatically. What was done for weeks by the pirate’s then? Nothing that hard to enjoy piracy. First fact is that the Govt. forgot to block secure addresses of Pirate sites. I mean that we could still access these sites by adding Https:// in front of Urls, as easy as that. Every Pirate is at least a little geek who can do this with a breeze. Many other people used VPN connection so they didn’t even noticed anything about this ban. And guess what, the ban was removed after only two weeks or less!

Conclusion: Pirate’s Win :-)

Famous songs site Songs.Pk

The famous and evergreen free MP3 songs site Songs.pk was banned by the Indian Govt. some months ago for the reason that it provided free music disrespecting the interests of the music creators. Nothing serious even now, we still had access to Djmaza which is the best alternative for downloading free Bollywood and International Pop music. But the point is the site was blocked, it was blocked. The owner is again back with a new domain named songspk.pk and all the songs were secure in their own servers so all he needed is to buy a new domain and bang, Piracy again won. Problem?

Conclusion: Pirate’s Win :-0

Summary

These two cases clarify that no one can stop piracy and if they want to, it will take years of hard work and strictness towards piracy. But is Piracy a good habit or are we becoming thieves day by day? Even after knowing that Piracy is illegal and can be very strictly taken, we must give up this habit for contributing to the hard workers who spend many hours day and night to make that awesome content to let you enjoy it and you just pirate it. But this should not happen, we must support the artist & writers and other people who create the original content by buying it. It will help them feel that they are doing well, so that they will become more awesome next time by seeing your support. Here are few more alternatives to Piracy:

For Normal Pirates:

Stop Piracy and quit torrenting: If you want that FTW quality, then piracy can never replace it. Buy original content and support the artists.
Use Gaming Parlor: Gaming parlors are also a great alternative to Piracy of games. You can head to gaming parlors and enjoy the quality and high graphics based games for very low amount of money and its worth trying if you are a hardcore gamer.
Buy original Music CDs: If you want to enjoy your favorite music, then goto Music shop in your nearby area and purchase the music CD. A normal music CD costs around $1 to $2 which is not such a big amount to pay if the music is worth it.
For bloggers: If you are a new blogger, copying content from other sites may seem fun and easy for you but, you need to stop that if you want to become successful in this blogging field. You can’t fool teacher (Google) by showing him copied content.
Last but the best: Please spread the awareness of piracy and its disadvantages with your friends and promote yourself to become a grownup legit customer if you want quality and help from officials.

For content creators:

Organize Giveaways: Launching giveaways and gifting freebies can help producers to reduce piracy but they must make sure that they do it at their best for maximum positive results.
Chop Down Price: The price tag makes a huge difference on the consideration of the buyer to buy the product or not. if your product is very costly,you will get negligible sales and the customers will run after piracy. So always try your best to reduce the product's cost if you want to increase your sales.
Take Legal Help: If your content is copied then you can file a free DMCA complaint to take down the victim easily. It usually takes less than a week and you must complain if you are the only creator of the content though.

Some Final Words

I hope that you enjoyed this article and extracted some good knowledge from it. I hate piracy and you should too, it harms both consumers ans producers in many ways. But the consumer will get to know his/her harm a little late when he will come to know the difference in the quality of the two. So I again request you to stop piracy and become a genuine consumer and enjoy life more happily. Thank You for reading this really long article and I hope you won't mind sharing this article with your friends.