There are hundreds of people in Goa who are downloading a song or movie as you read this. Piracy is illegal, but how 'wrong' is it?
Photo Credits: PG1. LEAD
For almost two decades now, there has been a war raging against piracy. On one hand, you understand the gripes of musicians, directors, producers and other creative minds. They work hard to create a song or a movie and then to see people listen or watch it for free is frustrating, since you can’t earn money on it. Pirates, on the other hand, say that there are millions around the world who should ideally have access to everything despite not being able to afford it. They also state that there are many who still pay for songs, movies and software, among other things. Hence, millionaires don’t lose money, they just make a little less.
The man behind Kickass Torrents (KAT), 30-year-old Ukrainian Artem Vaulin, was arrested in Poland. Vaulin has been accused of illegally reproducing and distributing hundreds of millions of copies of movies, video games, TV shows and music albums totalling more than $1 billion. The US is now waiting to extradite him.
Founded in 2008, the site has slowly grown to become the biggest torrent-sharing website in the world. It finally took the mantle in 2015 after The Pirate Bay experienced multiple raids, battled lengthy spells of downtime and its three founders were arrested. India has a large number of torrent users and pirates. How far will people go to get their favourite album or movie?
As far as piracy goes, now that KAT is down, something else will rise up. You know the myth about the heads of the hydra, well, that's online piracy for you. It will continue.
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PeopleSpeak
I use torrent to download various software and computer games for my little brother. Both these things are a little expensive in the market so it makes more sense to download them. Also, I can download different German movies for free to try and learn that language. That is something I depend entirely on torrents for.
Pranjali Dessai, game tester
As a musician I do not use torrents and also I'm not that much into movies. I get the movies I want from people who download using torrents though. I mostly download music theory videos and some songs which I’m supposed to cover and hence YouTube is the quickest and best. I can see the video which will suit me the best and download it. I've tried using torrents before, but never gained good results in the field of music educational videos, so I shifted to YouTube.
Nevin D’Mello, musician
