I have been lite light—hehe—on the computer recently. The past week or so I have been busy with a bunch of stuff that has kept me away from the computer and the Internet and thus news—although I don’t care for news anyway. Today however I was getting ready to do some work but in a split second decided to check a news site for the heck of it and was taken aback with what I saw. I read that Suprnova—and several others—had been indefinitely closed and could not believe my eyes. I was shocked the same way I was when Sharereactor died. The magnitude of the news was overwhelming. This in itself however was not a problem, well at least not in terms of killing my night. The problem was that it fired up my need for information and quickly spawned over a couple of dozen browser windows. Two hours later I had finally managed to close all the browsers—of course I had to read the information in it first—and was left with a few things.
First of all I was left with a yearning to do what Prince Roy Bates of Sealand did and find an abandoned island, claim it as my own, and create a new country. Then again I’m too busy and too lazy to do all the work that would no doubt be needed to create a nation, but I suppose I could call it a “project”.
Second, I was left with feeling of loss due to the closings of so many big hitters in the world of Internet piracy. Like many others who cannot afford to purchase things I rely on bootleg media which means finding them through these sites. Fortunately I did not panic like so many of the amateurs do. I have been around long enough to understand that if a desirable and successful technology goes down, a new and better one will soon pop up to take it’s place. I have seen piracy take many, many forms over the years and am not concerned.
When Napster died, many people freaked out but then eDonkey came along and people said woo. Then Sharereactor came along and people said woo hoo. Then Sharereactor died and people freaked out again. Next BitTorrent came out and people said HUH!? This is useless. Then Suprnova came around and people said HOLY COW! A few more torrent sites came along and people said this is awesome! Now that Suprnova and several of those torrent sites died people are again freaking out. So what are we to do? Nothing, just sit tight and hope that nothing—or rather not too many—big things that we really want gets released until the next alternative comes along.
Finally I was left with a feeling of sadness and anger. Sadness because I actually—choose to—feel a little bad for those greedy bastards like the MPAA and RIAA because when you look at the above paragraphs you realize that they are fighting a losing war. They keep hitting back and making a little progress but in the end the only win little battles but the war always stays in favor of the pirates by the very nature of the fight and the people on the two sides. The anger I felt was because of the timing. After looking through hundreds of posts by many dozens of people it seems that I am the only person who had any thoughts about how this recent strike is happening during the holidays/Christmas. It makes sense that they would want to shut them down to force people to go out and buy Christmas gifts instead of burning CDs of stuff but it also shows how greedy and heartless they are. Instead of being kind during the holidays they attack.
Nobody can say that they didn’t see any of this coming and yet we are all surprised when it happens nonetheless… interesting.