Piracy kills

Alas! Piracy is a crime. No doubt about that. It is theft. Plain and simple theft. Just like steeling a handbag, a mobile phone or a DVD from a store. You take something away from somebody without that person’s consent. That individual is left without its property. When steal a handbag, the owner can no longer use the items stored in there - of course, since you took it; and in the act of stealing possibly also deprived that person of sentimental value. You made her sad. That’s why theft is bad. The same is the case when you nick a mobile phone. The owner can no longer use it. You have it now. Period. Stealing a DVD is not much different. When there used to be 10 in stock, after you bag one, there will be only 9 left. One is lost. Gone. Disparu.

Copying movies or songs is piracy. It is theft and theft is a crime. Always been, always will. The Qur’an suggests that the thieves’ hand be cut off. According to the Common Law of England, until recently, theft was a capital crime. No laughing matter at all, you see. Neither is infringing on copyright protected material! You download an album illegally, you steal. The songs are gone; you take them away in the process of downloading, away from somebody else who can’t listen to them anymore because you took them away. That’s why using file sharing and P2P networks is a criminal activity and people who engage in those activities are nothing more than common thieves. Only fair if your ears are cut off when you download music or your eyesight is take from you when you watch a copied flick.

But this does not have to happen. One can repent. One can make amends and move out of the shady valley of illegality and into the rigorous realm of DRM, short for Digital rights management. No guilty conscience will spoil your delight when you listen to tracks which will only belong to you and no one else. No one can take them from, as they only play on your player and nowhere else. Plus, you don’t have to bother about records or CDs with real covers anymore which you will still have in future decades. It is only fair to pay 1 $ per song for being spared this sort of nuisance, and left instead with nothing but a bunch of intangible files for the price of a double CD a few years earlier.

These are a truly ragged times we live in. Gone the days when not a single soul taped songs from the radio and nobody made mix cassettes with their favorite songs for a loved one. Gone like The Fall Guy and the Red Threat. But, praise the Lord, real heroes like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jackie Chan make a case for ‘hunting down the bad guys.’ This is oh! so more important, considering that the people who produce pirated movies are the very same ones who counterfeit medicine! Our only hope can be that they get here in time and destroy the Axis of Piracy once and for all.

(see the clip at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf4pnY1wFiU)