Argg Are You A Pirate?

When people think of pirates they typically think of the old days with ships, gold and parrots. Unfortunately that is not the case, pirates these days can be almost anyone and they may not even know it. By downloading movies, music, games or even a book off the internet you are literally stealing money and sales from the company.

Most people think that if you download a song or two it won't hurt the company because they make a lot of money off of DVDs and other merchandise. WRONG! Millions of people are doing this, which when added up the companies are losing an excessive amount of money. You could even potentially go to jail for up to 5 years and/or pay up to $250,000 per song downloaded. If that isn't the worst of your issues by downloading random materials off the internet you are opening yourself up to viruses or identity theft.

The most common way people download music and other popular items online is by using a Peer to Peer (P2P) network. By using a program such as Limewire or BitTorrent you can upload or download a song and other people can download the song from your computer. By doing this you are able to be tracked quite easily by the police because you aren't masking your IP Address in anyway. That way the police are able to track your IP Address back to your house, as you might know now, that method isn't very effective. Torrents are too easy to track unless you use masking programs which allow you to download through a proxy server. Additionally if you want to be truly safe you can download through a file hosting server site such as RapidShare, Megaupload, Hotfile ect. This makes it so it obscures your IP Address when you download a file from them. So if you are too every download an illegal file, use a file hosting server site.

One of the biggest sources of illegal downloading is college students on campus, the campus regulates files that are being downloaded through their network which makes downloading illegal files very risky. If they catch you they have the option to turn you over to the police, disconnect you from the network or even dismiss you from the college on the grounds of theft.

So the moral of the story is not to steal things you don't own, even if you don't think you will get caught, it is still illegal and the chance of getting caught is always there.

(Additionally the part of posting our SSID, I do not own a router since I am directly plugged into a modem and therefor I do not have an SSID.)