"Free" Downloads Will Get You Fined!

This is the story of an American woman that used Kazaa to share mp3s. Of course, by doing that, she infringed copyrights. As seen on Gigwise she was fined $220.000, for illegally distributing more than 1.700 songs. She had been sued by several record companies and now she is forced to pay this huge fine; moreover, the woman, by the name of Jammie Thomas, will never be allowed to use a Kazaa account again.

In my opinion, this is just a 'small fish' these guy caught. Surely, she will never share any song on the web again, and probably her friends will be a bit frightened now, so chances for them to be/become pirates are scarce. However, I doubt this will thwart piracy. If you don't believe me, just get a random open source file sharing program from the web. If you join ANY hub, and see what those users share, then you're definitely realize that 1.700 songs is a small number.

No matter how hard security experts or law enforcers crack down on piracy, people that use the web for illegal downloads are just too many. And I was just thinking the other day - why is piracy still such a huge issue? Well, I think that it's basically because of people wanting something but not having enough money and also, because of poor software distribution. Like I've said - it's much more convenient (for some) to get free music, movies and software from the web and risk the consequences, than spend what they consider to be too much.

Furthermore, I think that software distribution is very poor in some countries; you have to search a lot to find some software in a shop, if you don't want to buy it from the web. I think that the most efficient way to fight piracy is stop giving people reasons to do it, rather than try to make the criminals pay.