There has been a lot of buzz in the media these past few
years about piracy on the internet. There are still some people that believe everything
the media tells them, and you see them posting stuff on forums like "all
pirates are dirty thieves!" and that sort of thing.
It's a shame they wonder around with their eyes closed,
and more than likely they themselves benefit from piracy. Allot of technical achievements
have come about because of pirates. Oh yes, both in hardware and in software.
The big companies that claim to be losing millions are actually making millions
due to these advancements made because of pirates. Let's take a look at a
couple of these things:
Digital music formats: The internet was getting more
popular, people where downloading things and a music format were needed. The
MP3 format came a long which solved the problem of large file sizes while
retaining decent enough audio quality. From this came many advancements in
audio codecs, audio formats, and hardware to play them on.
Apple somewhat legitimised digital music downloads with iTunes,
while also developing the iPod which made them millions of dollars. Of course
they were not the first company to make an MP3 player, but they made it popular
and so the market grew and grew. Millions of pounds a year is being made from
hardware that plays digital music files which are mostly obtained illegally.
So when Sony claims it loses millions because of music pirates:
complete bull shit. The Sony walkman is still a popular brand today; they have a
HUGE range of portable digital audio players.
Video file formats: pretty much the same thing as audio
formats. People wanted to download videos, movies and such. Divx/Xvid took care
of this bit. Commercial DVD players support this format, as well as PVRs using
the format to record shows from the TV. Advancements where made, better
compression, higher quality, higher resolutions in small manageable file sizes.
In comes the creation of X/H.264. The Blu-ray format is HEAVLY influenced by the h.264 codec. Half the work was done
for Sony when they joined other big companies to create the Blu-ray format.
Work done because of pirates. How much money is made off this format in both
hardware and disc sales? BILLIONS.
There is also a big market now for media players that connect
to your TV that play all these formats used by pirates. TVs made by the big
brand names such as Sony and Samsung also play these formats.
Let’s look at computer hardware, especially storage: hard
drives. These of course used to store many types of files, work, media etc.
Storage size gets bigger each year; I think to date the biggest commercial hard
drive is 4TB. The bigger sizes seem to be the most popular. Why so big though? Do
family photographs really take up that much space? No, they don't. That's right;
people are using them for music and video. I wonder how much money is being
made from sales of these every year.
Piracy is big business and big business is piracy.
Welcome to the internet.
