Engineering News

Ahhh, this brings me back.

<rant mode: on>

Funny thing is that the music industry throws so much money into anti-piracy policies, but people are going to figure out how to share files one way or another unless there's a total lock down of the internet (I shudder at the thought). Even then, as long as a computer can lock onto some sort of signal, peer to peer file sharing will always be a thing.

I can recall a "black box" going around campus in college. It had roughly 20 TB of music and movies, and if you saw the signal n your laptop, you could hop onto it and copy any amount of digital media you wanted. I can't recall the details, but I believe a similar idea was implemented somewhere else, but they might've called it a pirate box(?).

Semi-recently, there were a number of lawsuits against Pirate Bay and Mega Upload, which resulted in both sites being shut down. Since Pirate Bay operated on links to downloadable "torrents", many people just loaded the website onto a flash drive and distributed it. As soon as Mega Upload fell, three new sites took its place. I'm not saying or endorsing stealing, but the way companies are trying to combat it is counter-productive.

Gabe Newell, founder of Valve, made a point of saying that piracy can be countered by improving the means of distribution. Do people want to pay the same amount for a digital download as they would a physical CD? Probably not. Itunes had the decent idea of letting people preview 30 seconds of a song to get a feel for it before buying the songs, but then you -have- to listen to said songs on itunes or on your Apple device. They literally encode the file into some proprietary file format(I think ITL?) to prevent the usage in outside programs.

tl;dr - Too much time & energy is wasted on DRM. Distribution needs to improve, and more open source policies need to be implemented.

<rant mode: off>

yes, it does bring back memory's. One of which is dial-up connections.