Its four in the f*** in morning!

A line I cribbed from Shaun of the dead!
Actually its five in the morning in nama bengalooru. And as always I turn to blogging to kill time, though this time in the BMath blog, a privilege extended to me by the madcaps I had as my seniors.
I was thinking about the piratebay thing, which most of the internet users round the globe visit more often than not, except probably in US of A, Uncle Sam being his usual hawkish self. Now piratebay is a torrent site, which allows us to download loads of stuff using some torrent client like azureus. Its based in Sweden, which has pretty lax copyright laws or maybe, pretty ok copyright laws. Piratebay has been aggressively targeted by some organizations, most famously by MPAA, which is the Motion Pictures Association of America. MPAA urged, nudged, and probably kicked asses of some Swedish ministers and got Piratebay raided, although it was up in about 3 days. Have a look at this.
MPAA claims that Piratebay is in violation of copyright laws, that what it does is stealing. Legally though this might not exactly be right, the reason being Piratebay is more like an information giver, its like you ask this fellow where you might get stolen TV's or where the gangbang's going on. You can't prosecute someone for this, atleast that's what Swedish law says.
Ethically and economically however this is a different issue. The MPAA argues that this downloading is resulting in money loss for artists (as wide as possible), that it is something that might lead to loss of jobs, lowering of budgets and lowering of incentives for movie work. This is not quite true. First, most people download movies they otherwise won't have watched in theater or would have bought a dvd of, however the movie turns out to be good many do get the dvd (this is not quite true in India, what with dvd prices high and students, who are the major downloaders, budgets low) but you can see the comments in piratebay, in which the one who is sharing the movie, recommends it. Why do people take so much time to share a movie? My guess is that apart from the fact that they expect other people to share, they also want to show a good movie to others, akin to the way I used to run around trying to show movies in the audi. Besides sometimes this sharing can also greatly advertise a movie, case in point being that of The Man from Earth. Most of the movies being shared are popular hollywood movies, which I believe are downloaded by 20-30 years olds, mostly for time pass, but not out of an irresistible need to watch movies, I mean if Piratebay wouldn't have been around, they would probably watch TV, get a social life, masturbate, whatever. Some might rent a movie, this thing though I am not sure about, ie I don't know if
people will rent a movie unless they know its good, has got good reviews or is recommended by a friend. Although people do download movies indiscriminately, I mean 150 guys downloaded The Hottie and the Nottie for heaven's sake!!
Sharing is inherent in most humans and piratebay is just a big center for sharing. Rousseau defined civilization to be all about building fences, he famously said man is born free yet everywhere is in chains! But I can hardly criticize civilization to defend something that is a product of civilization! However, it is natural for us to try and break fences, fences are quite good but too tight fencing is not what we are looking for!
The important thing is that this is sharing which is going on, not stealing. I mean if they stop it, why not stop people from lending their DVDs, cameras, books, etc to their friends?
PS- Australian Aborigines were a race of people who were pretty much without any fence, they roamed wherever they wanted, each clan was like a big family in fact they hardly differentiated between there tribe and family, and if someone refused to share his wife, he was regarded as a bad sport!! I guess Kamleshji would have fitted right in, could have become sarpanch of an aborigine village simply by sharing the right thing!
PS2- One wonderful review of The hottie and the nottie said this - Watching this film was like having a view from underneath a toilet....and watching in horror as each piece of cinematic feces after another emerged, falling horribly and inevitably towards you.