WHEN FREEBIES ARE ILLEGAL

Illegal internet freebies is what is generally referred
generally referred to as piracy. Piracy is a huge problem all over the Internet. It cost the software industry alone about $12 billion last year. Here are the different categories of piracy going on today that takes money directly out of the hands of the owners and creators.

Some of these things include: software piracy of programs and PC games, digital music in the MP3 format of full albums or singles, full length movies of movies playing in theatres and movies released on DVD and VHS, old video games that now play as ROMs on software as well as console games that must be burned to a CD to play on the new console, and all the cracks going around that stop free trial periods.

The first of the above categories that was first to be pirated was the software of programs and PC games. This is was available because of Software cracks which have definitely played a big role in this, because in order to use the software a user can just have a key generated by the crack so they can avoid paying the programmers who created the software by adding the crack that tells the programmer that it was paid for.

There are many search engines out there that allow people to search for cracks in the many databases. This was common back in the time when CD’s weren’t as popular and when programs and games were simple enough and small enough to fit on a floppy disk.

Now however the CD is very common and software and games have become complicated enough to take up as much as 650MB on a CD. Crack hacks have found a way around the CD protection and because of this we now have isos. They are the exact extracted programs that were on the CD but are now compressed and on your hard drive instead.

The 600MB worth of files then has to be burned to a CD and will usually need another crack before it will be able to work. You probably won’t find isos in the public Internet like other freebies as no one wants to get caught. You’ll have to search newsgroups and BBSs or link in to the underground FTP if you want to trade to get them.

It’s a common thing for people’s entire software and game collection to be nothing other than burned copies these days. It’s a tempting thing that’s hard to resist, especially when you look at the price tags that accompany them. A friend can burn an iso to a CD for $5 whereas the companies out there will charge hundreds for theirs.

The rest of the categories for piracy are things like music, movies and console games have only experienced widespread Internet piracy in the past three years or so. With computer processing speeds getting faster and faster, hard drive capacities are growing and Internet bandwidth speed growing; movies, music and console games have been there.

Nowadays, you can get a movie that is currently playing in theatres and have it burned to a CD and be watched in a CD-ROM or DVD player for no cost other than that of the price of the cd you are burning the movie onto. You can also get computer software and play most any game for the N64 system or any of the older systems like the Super Nintendo, playstation and Xbox.

If you’d rather be current and up to date you can get Sony PlayStation, PlayStation 2 or Sega Dreamcast games burned very easily. These games are big and have to be burned to a CD for you to be able to play it on your new console. In the case of the Sony PlayStation, there is some extra hardware needed for you to play your pirated games, in the form of internal or external mod chips, which just goes to show you that they are smart enough to capitalize off of you.

It would be hard to find movies and console games in the public Internet, however there are various programs now that do the searching for you. The piracy and distribution of music is a different story altogether. The MP3 is a compressed version of a WAV file that you’d find on your music CD.

With its small size and good quality, the creation of the MP3 12 or 15 years ago has made music the most pirated thing on the Internet nowadays. Unlike movies and games, you can find MP3 music almost everywhere. There are web sites with 100’s of full albums that you can access simply with a banner click.

It’s a big network of people sharing music and has sparked the most controversy and these are called peer to peer networks. High profile musicians like Metallica and Dr. Dre have publicly launched lawsuits against Napster for distributing their music. That is okay because there are many others who are replacing napster anyways and they are far better.

Besides the collecting aspect, people have most enjoyed MP3’s for burning to mix CD’s. especially since today’s equipment ables MP3 players, car MP3 hard drives, stereo top MP3 players, and CD players that decodes MP3s while they play off of a burned CD.

Piracy over the Internet is almost impossible to stop. One reason is because there are no Internet laws that can be upheld, with privacy issues coming into play. Web sites that distribute pirated software, games, music and movies can be found and shut down but charges may never be laid which will just garner the web owners fines etc.

Pirated music, movies or games is just plain illegal and they are freebies that are extremely sought after. Some websites offer you free items like these legally because they get them from the companies so that the companies can get free advertising for their newer things.

Programs that hunt these pirated things down include Kazzaa, Morpheus, and Warez. They all offer free software, games and music illegally. If this sounds okay to you go ahead, but remember that you really are stealing and so are they!