Wednesday, July 16, 2008

uTorrent and Other P2P Software

July 16, 2008

 uTorrent and other P2P software can be very useful tools, but they can also be a plague on software, e-book, game, music, and video producers and take the money from the rightful parties. Yes I've downloaded stuff just because I wanted to know if it was worth $200 or more... but that does not make it right and yes it is the same as steeling.

How-ever not all things done with P2P programs are bad, say your looking for a program or a game that is no longer produced and the copyright is long gone, you search online with no success, so you try a P2P program and boom you found it... Should you download it? Damn straight you should grab it while you have the chance, because it is no telling when someone is going to share this classic gem again.

So weather or not P2P is good or bad depends on the user and what and their intentions. Are they downloading legal or illegal shares? Are they sharing copyrighted works? Do they download movies, music, and games that others have worked their asses off on.

I believe that work deserves compaction and if you want to try that $400 piece of software you should check with the authors website to see it there is a trial version for download. Take the album Minutes to Midnight by Linkin Park for example, I really wanted to download the album after I heard the song Given Up on the radio the other-day. But I decided to buy the album and rip the tracks to MP3 so that I could put them on my BlackBerry.

A few years ago I would have downloaded it without a second thought what-so-ever, but now I know better I did download a whole lot of music, movies, games, software, and e-books over a two year span. I did not sell any of it, I did not read all the e-books, install all of the software, games, listen to all the music, or watch all the movies... so is what I did wrong, your damn right it was wrong. I figured that I was not hurting anyone, just collecting stuff for my private use.

Did I ever get busted? No, I never got busted, I just got it it my head one day that it was wrong to download copyrighted works and just stopped. I sorted through all the software that I wanted and wrote the titles down on paper, I did the same for the games, music, movies, and e-books. I then deleted all that were copyrighted works and kept all the stuff that was freeware, open-source, trials, or abandon-ware.

I had over 400 gigs of data stored on an external hard-drive along with about fifty DVD's full of stuff. I have now narrowed my collection down to a wee little sixty gigs of freeware, open-source, abandon-ware, and trial software, games, and e-books.

I have also sorted through the fifty plus DVD's of stuff and copied the stuff that was legal for me to have, like copies of my personal data like music that I got from stores, pictures that I have taken, Divix videos that I made using DVD's that I got from Walmart so that I would not mess-up the originals when I travel.

Now if I could have done that with games like Diablo II, I would have never had to buy three copies of the game due to the lack of quality baggage handlers at the airports and bus stations. I even had a laptop screen get cracked due to some jerk-off not letting me repack my laptop after he removed it to check to see if it was a bomb... but that is another topic all together.

Anyway, I looked over my list of programs and searched for freeware that could do the same things, and then removed that item from my list. I searched for the e-books and found that most of them could be purchased for between $10 to $39 or in packages for as little as $10 that included master resale rights. So I brought and paid for just about every single e-book on my list for about $50 or $60 and now have about 400 to 900 e-books, software, and scripts that I have master resale rights to.

Moving on, I destroyed all of the DVD's that had illegal content on them or content that I did not have the legal right to own would be a better term... using the term illegal content makes it sound like I had hacking tools, kiddie porn (I think these bastards should be hung by their genitals and used as target practice, or slowly lowered into boiling oil at a rate of half an inch an hour)... sorry, I got side tracked, it just pisses me off to no end when some one hurts a child no matter the age, it make me sick... but again I'm sorry and that is a topic for another time.

Anyhow, I narrowed my collection of fifty DVD's down to ten DVD's of graphics, music, movies, e-books, and software that I have every right to! Now I still use uTorrent to find stuff that I can not find anywhere else or is no longer published. I like to search through these titles and see just how many titles are on there that are rips right from the big screen. I have never liked that practice either, I have seen two bootleg DVD's that someone was selling for $5 each and the quality of the video and sound sucked so bad that I told the guy that he should take these and shove them up his a**!

Sorry once again for getting off topic, but I'm the kind of guy that has to have good quality video and sound from a movie. That is why I own 500 DVD movies and the only copies that you will ever see in my home or in my bag at work are movies that I own or have owned and went bad, unless I copied them from my DVR to DVD... but most were pay-per-view, so I paid for them also.

I went from downloading stuff that I had no right to just because I did not have the money for it to saving the money and getting it the right way, buy paying for it. However I don't see why some of the software companies charge so much for their software. Take Microsoft Office at around $300 a pop, you can get the some features from Open Office for free, and look at Photoshop... The Gimp comes really close and with a few tweaks and plug-ins it can give Photoshop a run for its money... because it's free. Again not on topic but you can see that there are other options out there and you that there is no need to download copyrighted works from P2P services and such.

I use Open Office, Firefox, The Gimp, and many other free software. Now I do still use Paint Shop Pro 8 and 9 because I did buy them when they had a sell right from the Jasc website (no longer online)... I believe that they are owned by Corel now.

No comments: