My Life

Sunday

01/03/09

Well the beginning of another month. Gary MacKinnon will probably get tranferred to America and spend the rest of his life in prison for hacking into loads of computers. If he had any sense he would go over to Northern Ireland and cross the border into Southern Ireland. He would then be in a different country with a different legal system and the whole process would have to commence all over again! He might get a better result in Eire. Bail out, Gary and don't forget the laptop!!!

The internet is really making everything free. I have read newspapers from all over the world, today. All the British Sundays and Dailys are there, As well as Pravda(Russia), Jpost (Israel), L.A, & N.Y. Times (U.S.A.), TheAustralian, Perthnews (Australia) The Star (Toronto,Canada) to name but a few!

TV channels are also on the web coming from all over the world. Pundits of all persuasions write blogs on every subject under the Sun. Movies are available to download for free, sometimes before they are even in the cinema!! Books covering many subjects and of all kinds are free to download. Manuals, talking books and fiction are all available.

Music videos are played 24 hours a day on VH1 and MTV which can be recorded onto tape or DVD. Many singles and L.P.'s are uploaded for others to download. Concert videos are available too.

A huge amount of income is being lost to writers, musicians and film companies. The guys at Piratebay are currently on trail,again, in Sweden. The Civil case, as I understand it alledges fraud. Their defence again as I understand it is that they only provide the medium and have no control over what files are uploaded and downloaded.

It is surely ironic that it was Microsoft who designed and wrote the whole high speed big file moving bit torrent system. Winzip provided compression and ended up free. Now there is RAR which compresses bigger files and a license had to be purchased.

Movie people knew that the "freebie generation" would not buy a license and they placed their films within RAR.  Unfortunately, for them, it was short lived. You can now  get RAR on a 40 day free trial, probably, as it was not selling and so it has been copied and uploaded. It is now available free!!      Another one bytes (sic) the dust!!!

Oh well another week beckons so.........

byeeeeeee