You wouldn’t steal a handbag…
We’ve all seen the clip in the previews of a movie that informs you that downloading pirated copies of music and movies is illegal. They say that “you wouldn’t steal a handbag..”, “you wouldn’t steal a cell phone..” They are absolutely true! There are many dangers of illegal downloading.
A very real issue is that it really is downright illegal. What it has come to is that production companies are struggling with ways to try to keep people from stealing the music. They at one point ruled that all companies selling music online (iTunes, etc…) must include DRM in the file. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, and it prevents you (half-heartedly) from copying the file and sending it to all of your friends. I’m sure there are a million sites you can find with a google search to figure out how to get rid of the DRM on files you purchase. However, I will leave the moral decision-making to you. (You know you’ll do what you want anyway, right!? I know I would…)
The biggest concern of mine on this topic is your own safety. When you are downloading music from Limewire or some other network that provides P2P (peer-to-peer) file sharing, you are putting your trust in a complete stranger that the file you are downloading actually is what you think it is. You may THINK you’re downloading Michael Jackson’s greatest hits, but in actuality it is very easy for the person uploading that file to fake it out and just rename the file so that it looks to you exactly like an audio file.
What will inevitably end up happening is that some day you will download what you think is a real rockin’ song, you will attempt to play the file with whatever your media player choice, and will get a message like “____ Media player cannot play this file. It may be corrupt or invalid”. So you figure “damn, it didn’t fully download, I’ll have to do it again.” What actually happened was that it DID in fact download properly, however it’s not what you think it is. Since the creator of this file named it with an extension like ‘.mp3′, your computer knows automatically that it should open it up with your media player. When it gets to the media player, it’s not a valid audio file and you get an error.
Once you make an attempt to open that file that you thought was a song or video, you have executed it, and if it is a virus or some sort of bug or tracking device, it is now getting all comfy and making itself at home in your hard drive. It could contain a key-logger, which is especially dangerous. This type of bug tracks every single key you press on your keyboard and makes a log of it. Then, every so often it “phones home” via your internet connection and sends the log file with your keystrokes to the creator of the file. If they are able to pull this string of text from your key log they’ve got your bank account information!
www.chase.comdrudarbymybluecar….
All in all, it is very important to keep yourself safe online. Even if you use antivirus software, most of the time that will not catch an infection until it is already fully manifested in your computer. Sometimes it can be removed, sometimes not. Good viruses often attach themselves to important system files, so that if you are able to remove them, your operating system will no longer boot. Try and do the right thing and just pay the 99 cents for a song on iTunes.
You’ll feel better about it in the long run. 