Talk to the big corporations 'bout that hiker - 'Sesame Street' apparently had it all wrong, sharing is evil and is the biggest threat to the world since terrorism, actually according to MGM and a few others - actually
funds terrorism
(I'm really not makin' this BS up, check:
P2P filesharing funds terrorism? Enquiring congresspersons want to know. goggle for more ifn ya want) despite the fact there's no monies exchanged with p2p unless yer gettin' scammed.
They really can't do much to combat sharing - but you can bet they're trying, while they don't tend to target the "lil fish" (those who jus' DL a few songs here and there), know that your ISP is not only carefully watching your bandwidth consumption but is actively embedding malware and "fake" files (Comcast is the number one bastid,
Search Results comcast for the tip of the iceberg) and we've even caused some international incidents and riots by attempting to enforce our domestic copyright laws in other countries (Sweden is a primary example:
Sweden threatened with Trade Sanctions by the US).
Still, simply downloading is a "gray area" and while you might get some hate mail from your ISP and mebbe even get your service disconnected - uploading (sharing your stuff w/others) is hazardous, the more you share - the greater the risk, this has nothing to do with generating a profit - even simple sharing is the devil.
Perhaps one day they'll realize that most of this "piracy" is a direct reflection, in opposition to the corporation's rampant greed - that they're not likely to get any sympathy while they're trying to sell single songs for a freakin' dollar, tracks that may well erase themselves after three plays or if you try to transfer them to another 'puter (digital rights management (DRM) encoding is one example), or a plastic disk valued at 50c or less being sold for $20+ even though it's been censored and/or such a low audio quality that it sounds like they're singing thru a pillow (done to reduce filesize, thus decrease the time it takes to batch burn in massive quantities).
*shrug* No - it's far simpler to turn all of our younger generation into criminals for doin' what we always told them was the nice, right thing to do - play nice & share with their friends
Do w/e ya want - but know that it's mildly dangerous, even if for no other reason than you're never quite sure what you're downloading till after you've got it (potential for malware), it's a greedy, evil world and the 'net is a prime example - a lil paranoia goes a looooong way on the interwebz
