The problem I had was coming up with subjects to search for. So, as usual, I surfed. And I found some very interesting blogs that fell into my interest areas. Although it’s probably not the best topic to put in my blog, seeing as I highly doubt anyone will actually read this, I’m gonna go ahead and do it.
I am a criminal. I love bittorrent. I am well aware of the illegality of this, but I don’t really care (too much). For anyone not familiar with bittorrent, it is a file sharing program. Often times (most of the time) the files shared are copyrighted making it illegal to share them making them pirated. I even have a parrot I put on my shoulder while I do this – and I’m not joking. I actually have a live parrot and he likes to sit on my shoulder. I now know this is the reason pirates have eye patches cause he’s a mean sucker and likes to bite. Anything. But back to my confession.
I have three rationalizations that make this okay. 1) I primarily download television shows that I missed because my DVR sucks. Once I’ve watched the shows, I delete them. 2) I do not sell or burn copies to share of anything I download. 3) some of the stuff I pirate has not been licensed in the
But this is beginning to change. Recently a lot of the big networks are starting to post the latest few episodes of their shows on their web pages making it unnecessary for me to download the shows. NBC has gone even farther and created Hulu.com. this is an awesome site that has television shows and movies from a number of networks including Fox, Warner Bros. and MGM. The shows they post there are available for viewing at any time and instead of a few minute long commercial break you’d see during a regular television show, they have a single commercial 15-30 seconds long. Frankly, I think this is the best approach to stopping piracy. People will still buy the DVD sets when they come out because they want to actually own them, but the need to resort to bittorrenting the show just because you missed an episode is now gone. I have a cable modem so I have 24hr service and actually prefer this to downloading them because the quality is better and the threat of legal prosecution is gone. Besides, once I’ve watched an episode, I delete it from my hard drive, so for me, it’s the best option. Since hulu is continuously increasing the number of shows available, not only have I seen some shows I’d never considered watching before, but have the ability to go back and catch up on some of the shows I’ve lost track of over the past couple seasons.
BUT, now that I’ve confessed my illegal activities I’ll get back to the main point of this entry. Technorati had a blog with the latest on bittorrent and the search engines listing and hosting some of these torrents. The file sharing is actually really neat. I downloaded a free program (actually named Bittorrent but there are other programs available and some of them charge you to purchase the program) that allows me to download selected files from other peoples computers. The person has to specify what files they want to share and depending on the number of people offering the same file, you may get the entire file in a couple of minutes (single 30min episode) or it could be days (an entire season of episodes). Patience is important. It’s a kinda short explanation, and it wasn't meant to be the topic of this post, but you get the idea. I was able to find something that interested me.
Lame ending, huh? A lot of stuff to read to find what I thought about technorati , isn't it? sorry.
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