Martin Koss – thinking out loud…

It winds me up sommat rotten when I hear of someone using a bogus copy of expensive software that the rest of use shell out good money for, or when I hear of someone’s huge collection of divx movies that were hacked and downloaded for free, or the DJ who proudly advertises 100,000 tracks – most of which came from LimeWire or some other dodgy website…

The thieving cheating criminal ______________s…
(feel free to fill in the blank with your own choice word)

Just this morning (or, the other morning, depending on when you’re reading this – or, one morning about a year ago – you get the idea) I was checking some ‘latest’ Google snippets and came across a PDF of Chris Brogan & Julien Smith’s book “Trust Agents” was now available via one of those sites that should, quite frankly, never get indexed by Google, should never be given any search engine rankings and should be taken down for illegal activities.

Why do police drop a heavy hand on some petty criminal who copied a few tracks from his buddy’s computer or gave away a hooky copy of a DVD when it’s websites that make it all possible that should be hit with a legal tonne of bricks.

If the law came down hard on the people who run the websites and enforced the hosting companies to monitor and block such content and then charges were pressed – maybe some of these _____________s would stop doing what they do.

If a newsagent sold inappropriate material to an under-age customer, his shop could be closed down and the owner would get a criminal record. How petty in comparison to the tens of thousands of illegal videos, MP3s, easy access porn, etc., that countless website owners put online – not forgetting or excusing the hosts who provide the space to do so…

It’s all wrong.

The frightening thing is that many people, kids especially, take all this ‘sharing’ for granted and think (or pretend to think) its all okay and the way things are done. What could be wrong with half a dozen kids sitting around the playground exchanging music from one Bluetooth device to another?

When I came across ‘Trust Agents’ as an illegal PDF download, I sent Chris a message. Fortunately he had seen the entry on Google too and was already on the case. But how many other authors, software developers, musicians, actors etc., are being ripped off in this network of ‘sharing’ websites?

We all know it goes on but so few people are prepared to be a ‘snitch’. Why? I think we should all report dodgy downloads; we should all be ‘informants’ and should all be educating our kids, and dropping subtle hints to anyone we know who ‘shares’ or obtains illegal material.

If we do nothing then the web will continue to burst at the seams with illegal downloads overpowering the legitimate websites that have every right to be the top of Google.

It would be a great day when Google clamped down on these illegal downloads and stopped them from appearing in search results; stopped anyone from uploading videos to YouTube that tell people how to get software for free or how to hack a DVD and to rip-n-share music…

Surely Google has the capability and surely it’s a good thing for the mighty Goog to do in order to set an example.

 

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