I687, London:
The tall guy was sitting under a tree in a park; sipping tea and thinking about the inflation and the grocery bill. Suddenly something dropped on his head.
-Ouch!!
He looked upwards and discovered an apple tree and looked downwards and discovered gravity (figuratively speaking of course!).He published his findings in “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica”
2008, Kolkata:
I was sitting in my friend’s house, sipping tea and talking about joining date of TCS and music of “Rock On!!” and listing to Debankar’s guiter .Suddenly something dropped on my head. I looked up and discovered a disk of “Munnabhai MBBS ”. I looked down on the disk and discovered copyright.
Actually I didn’t discovered copyright; I discovered the disk was original. Now that’s a bit complicated, what the hell original disk means? Most of us go through life without seeing a single original disk of anything i.e. movie, software etc. And here in my hand was an original piece, written behind “buy original CD or DVD, kill piracy”.
I heard so many times on TV, radio that musicians are requesting people to buy music and save their livelihood. I also saw people saying copyright means my right to copy. I looked at my computer, it was starting up. The OS was pirated Windows XP. The anti-virus was pirated; most of the softwares I use are pirated. Almost all the songs that sit on my machines are copyrighted and haven’t paid anything for them. The movies I have watched till now were all pirated. Where that does leaves me? In fact everywhere I look I see rampant copyright violation. I tried to calculate the damage done to entertainment industry by me. It came to around 500 movies and so around 20000 bucks. I alone cost that much!!! That too without considering the songs or eBooks collections that I pride myself. I didn’t dare to calculate further.
Then something struck me. I never heard any musician or author (of course of modern times) dying of starvation. That obviously doesn’t mean anything. I decided to probe further. An audio CD costs around Rs.100. Which is not very cheap considering it contains around 8-10 songs all of which are not good, whereas one can download it for free. And there is not much difference between qualities. So the choice is between high priced over hyped products and free illegal materials. No prize for guessing the winner.
I remember about a particular incident. It was 19th July 2007, Harry Potter and deathly hallows was to come out 2 days later and I was already reading it in eBook format. When it finally came out I have finished it by then. Now, if I was author it would be terribly distressing to know that my creation wasn’t fetching me anything or will it be? It would also probably mean that people like my writing so much that they are willing to suffer damage to eyesight by staring to computer monitor to read a book!!!
Actually it is very difficult to find a solution. One possible solution could be to lower the prices of original pieces or maybe to make the quality of original pieces better so that copying them damages their quality.
Its no point crying over piracy, otherwise it wasn’t possible to listening songs or watching movie so much. So, keep on doing whatever you do, just be careful to avoid using traceable downloads. CHEERS!!!
2 comments:
"Then something struck me. I never heard any musician or author (of course of modern times) dying of starvation."
Dude! what r u saying?? have u seen baul singers? do they really deserve to be so poor? dont u think if people wud have been forced to BUY CDs/cassettes, their culture would have been uplifted & encouraged? people these days dont even bother to BUY stuff & thats a reason why there r so many commercially unsuccessful musicians all over the country. whereas in US or other western countries, people throng to buy CDs/see even less popular bands/groups. that encourages music movement. that encourages some people who live to follow their passion... same with software/movies etc ... its ethically wrong to download stuff. but still we do it. i personally feel guilty @ times. but cant help it... we r a third world country/a developing nation. we dont have any money to buy those costly stuff. but i suppose you shudnt take pride in downloading stuff. i remember a recent incident... after the movie "Rock On!!!" a line was displayed "Dont download the music BUY the CD". as soon as it was displayed almost every1 in the hall started laughing at it, including me! then i felt guilty actually ... musicians/software programmers/movie makers should get their due. otherwise how will they get the encouragement to make good stuff???!!!
When I said musicians of modern times,I meant musicians who are commercial in nature.Yes,thats probably beacuse people dont know about musicians whom they dont listen.Which means if someone's music is not being pirated thay are not getting enough listeners.This is a scary thought.People should buy music to make the musicians happy.Most of the people understand this too.The problem is of course money.If a 600 page book costs Rs.700 its definately a pocket pincher.
I will finish with another incident.There was a book called "five point someone" by Chetan Bhagat.I never found its ebook version.Do you know why?Every forum I searched,it was same answer:"dont discourage this author and the book is cheap enough.I guess when that feeling comes from your inside,piracy dies a natural death.
Buy a book,make an author happy.
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