The very nature of the Internet favors not only the birth, but also the flourishing of piracy.
You may have heard about the shutdown of the Pirate Bay , the world's largest piracy website by traffic, earlier this month . Specifically, Swedish police raided the site's servers "after years of investigation and evidence gathering," the site itself announced (although this is disputed), and arrested several people who appeared to be involved in its operation. At the same time, other sites with similar content, such as EZTV, were also shut down, leading many to talk about a comprehensive anti-piracy campaign that is finally yielding impressive results.
Instant… cloning
All of this, however, has little to do with reality. And this is because the truth is that no arrest and no "closure" can prevent - or even limit, as it seems - internet piracy. Specifically, the "closed" Pirate Bay has already cloned (i.e. transferred) its entire database to another well-known website, from where it practically continues its operation unhindered. Another method used by pirates is the transfer of servers to other countries with different cybercrime and copyright legislation - the Pirate Bay itself had temporarily opened the day after the intervention, with a "flag" of Costa Rica. And of course, as a last resort, there are always proxy servers. To put it as simply as possible, we are talking about electronic "intermediaries", which intervene between the ordinary user and the pirate site, directing the former to find what they are looking for, without even entering the pirate website directly...
In short, the very nature of the Internet is such that it favors the birth and the rise of piracy. The data, moreover, recently published for 2014 by the website torrentfreak.com and concerning the illegally downloaded series of the year, show a general increase in data traffic, despite the various legal measures implemented this year internationally (see Britain, Italy) to combat it. The champion, of course, is the phenomenon of “Game of Thrones”, which in fact had more illegal downloads than legal viewers, while the also very popular “The Walking Dead” and “Big Bang Theory” follow.
Convictions and maneuvers
It is clear, therefore, that it is one thing to condemn piracy, which indeed deprives its legitimate owners of huge amounts of intellectual property, and quite another to realize a reality in which there is (a lot of) room for maneuver. The Americans, as pioneers in marketing and advertising, have already begun to take initiatives in this direction, increasingly adopting the transition to legal Internet - and at low cost - data traffic. After all, as President Obama himself stated two months ago, "anyone, anywhere's access to the Internet cannot be subject to restriction or censorship.".
Source: kathimerini.gr
