Musings on Copyright theft… well Torrenting and other things…

So here I am in Malta, where the local channels on TV are mostly in Maltese, all two of them (unless you want to include the political ones)… The DVDs and Blu-Ray available are a small selection of what is out there (and none of what I want)… So what’s a girl to do..?

Well 4 years ago I got a Dreambox and pointed the dish at Astra (28.2E)… and got British TV… well until they put Astra 2d up then I had to move to Sky channels (also British) but upon trying to get a Sky card to legitimately pay for what I was watching I was refused… point blank… so I upgraded to a motorised unit and a 1.2m dish and had a look at Europe….. Oh the channels it opened up.. I continued….

Fast forward to Sept 29, 2013 and Astra 2e was launched, and predictably in early 2014 channels started getting migrated to the new satellite… Of course I still can’t buy a card without a UK address (as if I would want to live there with the current political climate!)… So I did the next best thing… Meet “Colossus” my 48T storage server… I started torrenting…..

Not something I wanted to do, but it fit the bill, I was able to watch my favourite TV programs in English, when and where I want… I still watched FTA British TV with the 2.4m dish “upgrade” I treated myself to along with a number of Sky channels including the movie channels using card-sharing…. something I don’t actually want to do, but it is the only option.

Fast forward to March 2015, Astra 2e is put into full service and movie channels and most of the FTA channels are now on the Northern footprint and “sex hotlines” seem to be the order of the day for the European footprint, so now I am virtually completely reliant on Torrents for all my TV and Movies… Guess I finally succumbed to the dark side (well is it really “Dark”? given that I wanted to pay, and I was denied, then after I found a solution, that has been denied now, I went to the “Dark Side” and joined the P2P cloud and now with my 100M Ethernet to the ‘Net’ I share and share alike to see the programs I’m happy to pay for….n Is that really “Dark”…?)

So what’s this post about, well some (DMCA/MPAA idiots) will consider it a confession of a criminal….? Really is it though?

I want a service, I was denied that service, so I found the next best thing, and because it is a “soft” target “illegal” service it was also denied to me by technical means (I’m not going to put a 4.3m dish on the roof!).. so I went to do what everyone else does (you know what they say, “If you can’t beat them, join them!” not because I want to but because it’s my only option… and guess what… it’s better than the “Sky” service I was willing to pay some £70+ per month for!

Now when I want something, I just download it, because it’s a hell of a lot less hassle than flying to the UK to go watch it.

So my message:

Take note DMCA/MPAA/Sky and other providers, if you want to stop the pirates stop making more of them by blocking those who would pay for the service!

Oh and Foxtel, take note: Limiting Grimm and the likes to those who get “Full Subscription” is doing the same thing, people will download it because they *can’t afford* to pay you for your top subscription (and in reality if they only want one particular program, why the f**k would they pay for it?)

Give the people what they want for a reasonable price and pirating will go away… Screw every last $0.01 in profit and people will find alternatives they can afford.

(even Microsoft worked out they couldn’t stop the pirates and in the end it was causing them more trouble than the lost revenue through reputation issues!)

Comments welcome!