'Bulletproof' safe havens are all the rage for Internet pirates

Filed under: Internet, P2P

Have you ever put much thought into Internet piracy?

'Ooh, cool, tons of free stuff!' -- no, I mean, really thought about it.

In almost every Western nation software and music piracy is theft. In the eyes of the law it's wrong. There's simply nothing more to it: it's intellectual property that you're stealing from the property's owner. As mere users, just single faces in a crowd of millions, we're relatively safe. It's like stealing an apple from a busy market stall: it's not particularly hard, it's not very damaging -- and at the end of the day, it's hard to catch a single thief in a crowd of millions.

Organized crime, on the other hand, is serious business. You can think of BitTorrent sites and trackers as organized crime units. In some cases they control the flow of goods from the source all the way to the end user, and sometimes they're just masters of distribution -- either way, it's these organized units that get most of the heat from governments and groups like the RIAA and MPAA. Conventional wisdom has it that it's greater 'value for money' to shut down the big boys rather than go after run-of-the-mill pirates like you and I (hypothetically speaking, of course). In most Western countries it's very easy to shut down pirate groups -- it's just a matter of asking the ISP nicely.

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'Bulletproof' safe havens are all the rage for Internet pirates originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 06 Jan 2010 12:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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