The Pros and Cons of Piracy

Pirate MemePiracy - 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

Three Kind of People


 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.

Benefits of Pirated DVD
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

iPod Touch Tatto

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.

Call of Duty 2 DVD
Benefits of torrents

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.

WinRar vs 7zip: Which is better?

File compression means to compress the files to save disk space and faster copying of data. Though media files like songs and movies can't be much compressed and have a very high compression ratio, But on the other hand #games and #applications have very low compression ratio, depending on the nature of files included in the application/game. The lower the compression ratio, the less is size of compressed file and it also increases the time to decompress the file too. But in nowadays we have a plenty of time to decompress as if we compress a game, it will become smaller in size and thus increasing free space in removable drives like flash drives. So it means we can carry four compressed games or one installed game at a time.

             Compression ratio = Compressed file size/Actual file size X 100

In easy language, If the full installed game is of 2 GB and the compressed version of it is of 1 GB, then the compression ratio is 50%, which is not bad if you want to carry more stuff in the same drive.
Now when it comes to choosing the best compression software, the following things should be kept in mind:

What determines how good is a compression software?

  • Does it have a good compression ratio?
  • Does it decompresses quickly?
  • Does it supports SFX (SelF EXtracting Archives) archives? (Optional)
  • Is it popular?
I will answer these four question by comparing two compression softwares, WinRar and 7Zip. You may be familiar with WinRar as it is replacing WinZip very quickly. Now, most pirated compressed softwares and games are compressed using WinRar. What has made WinRar this popular? And what about 7Zip. 7Zip is a new comer and has more power and less compression ratio that you can never imagined. In the end of this post I will show you the awesome power of 7Zip, so read the full post if you don't wanna miss the WOW part. So lets test these apps hand-to-hand.

Test 1: Compression Ratio

Compression ratio is the most important factor for any file compression software. As I have told you that the compression ratio is inversely proportional to the extraction time, but still having a low compression ratio is very useful.This is because of the following reasons
  • If the compression ratio is lower, then it will decrease the file size.
  • Download will complete quickly
  • Less #internet data will be used.
  • Your file will become popular in p2p sites, where people look for the smallest file size before downloading.
So after knowing the benefits, the time increased in extracting the files is negligible at all. Now lets see what you can compress with high and low compression ratio:

Media files: Like MP3, M4A and all video files have very high compression ratio of 99% or even 100%. So its useless to compress these files as media files have a different compression method, and that is by changing data rate and frequency. So you should never try to compress media files and use them as it is.

Documents: Like PDF, [.]Doc and others have also a negligible compression ratio around 95% to 100%
So there is no need to compress them. But if the document is a HTML file, then you shall get low compression ratios due to a number of uncompressed files present in the html website's content folder.

Games: Games are game changer in the compression ratio. You can get ratios from 0% to 100%. Basically it depends how the game is programmed and what resources does it use. For example, if the game has cut-scenes of [.]Bik format (Bink Video), it will have a high compression ratio and on the other hand if it uses gaming engine like RAGE and Euphoria, then it might be helpful as cut-scenes of games using these engine are generated on the spot and thus have a low compression ratio. One more plus point is that games have many raw files that are uncompressed so as to get faster game-play. So that is the reason you get very low compression ratio while compressing games.

So we will use a game in the compression test as most of the games have a low compression ratio.
So the test starts here, in the test I will compress the game GTA: San Andreas using two different software WinRar and 7Zip. Here are the specs of my PC:

CPU: Intel Dual Core E 5700 3.0 GHz
RAM: 2 GB DDR3 Kingston
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit (Genuine and not torrented)

So here the test starts, in this test I will try to compress San Andreas in a grouped manner. Lets see the file size before compression and after compression.
Note: The compression was done with highest setting possible and the game is untouched.

Results

File Size Summary

Size of different files/folders in MB (Mega Bytes). Lower is better

                       

File Size Graph

The below graph shows the folder size (In MB) before compression, after compression with Winrar and 7Zip.
P.S. Lower is better.
                              

Time Taken 

The below graph shows the time taken (In seconds) to compress with WinRar and 7Zip. 
P.S. Lower is better.


Compression Ratio

The below Graph shows the compression ratio of compressed folder using Winrar and 7Zip. 
P.S. Lower is better      

Summary Of Test 1

You should be pleased to know that both of the softwares have done their work in a good way. WinRar compressed a 4.7 GB game to 667 MB and on the other hand, the powerful guy 7Zip did it in only 476 MB which is around 10 times smaller than the original installed game. Apart from giving lower compression ratio, 7Zip has one problem, and that is it takes slightly more time than WinRar, but after all what matters is lower compression ratio and 7Zip did this perfectly.
So the winner of this round is 7Zip, Yipee!!!

Test 2: Decompression Speed

Decompression speed also plays an important role, but in the test I am testing only two software namely WinRar and 7Zip. In the both software, the decompression speed of compressed files is almost same. So there is no need to worry about this. I added this point to let you know about some more compression softwares like KGB Archiever and UHARC which may offer lower compression ratio but their decompression speed sucks and in some cases the speed of decompression maybe more than that of compression. So why use these apps when you can enjoy faster decompression and lower decompression time.
So the winner is : Draw Both WinRar and 7Zip have identical and fast decompression speed.

Test 3: SFX Archives Support

SFX archives are the compressed files that have the ability to decompress themselves without the need of root software installed that created them. For example a SFX based WinRar archive can be decompressed without using WinRar. They look more beautiful and helpful and just cost additional 500 KB to the archive. For example, a compressed [.]Rar archive is of 50 Mb then its SFX version will be of 50.5 MB. Below is a screenshot of how a SFX WinRar looks, the field that are blackened out can be edited manually as per needs of the user to personalize it.



Not only these fields, there are more tons features, I will tell them to you later after sometime. I will tell you more on how you can make your own WinRar SFX archive. So Stay tuned to the blog and subscribe for quicker access. So its obvious that SFX archives looks more good than extracting manually using WinRar. Now what about 7Zip? 7Zip also supports SFX archives but not in a better way WinRar does. In 7Zip, the user is given very less options to customize the SFX and the SFX archive looks boring too. Whatever, have a look below too:
7zip SFX archive


So the winner of this round is: WinRar 

Test 4: Popularity

Popularity is also one of the points to be considered when choosing for a perfect compression software. this is the reason  why WinRar is more popular than 7zip. Do you know that Winrar was started 17 years ago by Eugene Roshal (its developer), in year 1995. this may be the reason as it provided better compression ratio than WinZip, Oh BTW in this time no one can call WinZip as a compression utility. The drawbacks of WinZip are following:
  • Compression ratio is never less than 95%
  • Its better to just copy files rather then compressing it for the sake of saving a slightly more space
Though its was less useful than compared to WinRar and 7Zip but still it has following benefits.
Note: I am talking about benefits of [.]Zip compression and not WinZip, It always sucked.
  • Zip files can be accessed and created without the need of any additional software unlike WinRar and 7zip. Now even mobiles and Linuxes support [.]Zip extension
  • As we know that only one file can be downloaded at a time using FTP connection, Zipped files saved time by downloading all file in once.
  • Some folders that contain many system files (.Cab, .Dll, .Exe and many more) take time to copy in flash drives, due to increase in number of files. In this scenario one can create a zip file of the folder and it will be copied instantly thus saving time for both the sender and receiver.
These were the benefits of using zipped (.Zip) file. But soon in the previous years, WinRar is also becoming very popular due to many facts like lower compression ratio and faster decompression. It please all the pirates because people prefer to download games and application which are small in size. the zip extension is eliminating very quickly but still its never bad to use one. If one person want serious compression, then I would recommend him using Winrar due to its popularity and low compression rates at the same time.
So the Winner is: WinRar

Conclusion

As the title suggests, this post was mainly published to choose the best from Winrar and 7Zip. But both of them performed very well in all the tests, but 7Zip missed the SFX test. On the other hand, it beats WinRar in the compression ratio test. So in my opinion, I like WinRar slightly more than 7Zip due to the vast variety of features and accessibility. I am not saying that 7Zip is bad, it also good and useful fr getting more better results but it needs to be more popular than WinRar and I hoe that one day it will replace it Rar files completely. This fight is just like the fight of #Facebook and #Google+. Though Google+ is better than Facebook in all ways, but it still lacks user preference because major population still prefers Facebook and it will take some to change the hood.
So what is your opinion in choosing the best compression software and which one do you use. please let us know and we will review it too. Thanks for reading, you are very awesome person alive on Earth.

Bonus

And here is your bonus, as I told you above in the post. I have found a file that can be compressed from GB to KB. Yes you saw right, I am saying that you can compress a file of 1 GB into mere 250 KB. the file is located at this location in your GTA: San Andreas game folder:

Drive:\\GtaSA\Audio\SFX

Here in this folder you will find a file named SPC_GA. You can compress this 1.02 GB file into 250 KB using WinRar or 7Zip as you wish. Amazing!!