Is anyone after you and your illegal file sharing anymore? – Grasp 16′
Is anyone after you and your illegal file sharing anymore? – Grasp 16′
All of a sudden things seem to have to eerily quiet on the tackling of illegal file sharing. Or at least on the surface it seems it has. In a moment of irony after I myself began looking into this subject I was astonished to find the proper large scale efforts of government to tackle illegal P2P sharing via internet service providers took place well over five years ago and furthermore the top hit I found whilst searching the subject was an article on “Pirate Bay vs Kickass Torrents” which site “is safer following serious malware attack by hackers”. The latter seems to indicate the state of play currently.
Has P2P illegal file sharing just become an accepted fact of life now? In a real world sense as and when an illegal file sharing site is challenged and its various servers and domains are shut down, already prior to that point its entire content and a carbon copy of the site has usually migrated over to a new domain and a new territory altogether. Each time this happens, those wishing to shut down its services have to adjust their aim for the particular laws of that given territory. It is a constant game of cat and mouse in which the cat has to request new sanctions to challenge the mouse every time it gives chase.
But don’t be fooled into thinking you can plunder the internet for all its got. More and more, sites like Pirate Bay and Kickass Torrents are under attack from ever increasingly sophisticated malware attacks. The conspirators among us even go so far as to say this is the governments way of challenging these sites “in the dark” seeing as they are failing to challenge otherwise. And there is something to be said of the broader issues with illegal file sharing. The music, software and film industries have been affected profoundly and increasingly so by the resultant drop in revenue. All of these industries are doing their utmost to work around the now almost accepted fact that intellectual property isn’t sacred anymore. But as time passes there is only a finite amount of time the ground level musicians, amateur filmographers and developers can justify their efforts on shoestring budgets.
So the very long answer to the question of this article is, yes, there are some small efforts being done to prevent people from file sharing but the authorities’ focus is on those who run and proliferate the platforms for P2P file sharing – the source if you will. You are less likely to have a knock on the front door from someone investigating your glutenous downloading of illegally gotten content but more likely to get a very quiet tap on the backdoor of your online banking account as someone mines for your information after entering your systems via file sharing websites. It is worth entertaining that music, films and software are cheaper and more convenient than ever to source, and there is something to be said for the feel good factor of putting money back into these industries which are very much “the finer things of life” type industries and industries ultimately we couldn’t live without.
