Preventing Piracy: A Guide On How To Avoid Pirate Activities


Foreword:


I am a man who has despised piracy and the works of copyright thieves my entire life. As soon as I could understand what copyright was, I became a massive proponent for it and for what it stand for: Order, a bulwark against those who'd stoop so low as to steal someone else's idea and pawn it off as their own. I can not STAND pirates, I get physically violent around them, my family has banned any mention of pirates or pirate adjacent activities in my presence! Yet however much I hate pirates, I understand that some people simply do not know better; some are ignorant to the damage they're doing by downloading a game or a book for free. That's what this guide is for, for those who don't know how to avoid piracy!

In this guide on avoiding piracy, I seek to teach you, the reader, on how to spot piracy in the wild, and the most common / popular services currently used in modern copyright theft so that you may avoid them.



What IS Piracy Anyways?


The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines piracy as:

 ... The unauthorized use of another's production, invention, or conception especially in infringement of a copyright

While the Cambridge Dictionary defines piracy as:

 ... The act of illegally copying computer programs, recordings, films, etc. to sell them at much cheaper prices

Now these definitions, while succinct, are insufficient for truly understanding what piracy is and what it entails. What does it mean to "illegally" copy a piece of media, or to "infringe" on copyright? Maybe Wikipedia's definition of piracy is better:

 Copyright infringement (at times referred to as piracy) is the use of works protected by copyright without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, such as the right to reproduce, distribute, display or perform the protected work, or to make derivative works. The copyright holder is typically the work's creator, or a publisher or other business to whom copyright has been assigned. Copyright holders routinely invoke legal and technological measures to prevent and penalize copyright infringement

Ok now we can work with this. Summarizing, piracy -- or copyright infringement -- is when someone does something to a copyrighted work without permission, like making a copy and redistributing it. This is, for the most part, the extent of piracy for most internet users: the copying and redistribution of a copyrighted work. The actual details of real copyright law are a bit too verbose and unnecessarily fine-grained for this guide, so I'll spare you the detail.

TL:DR - Piracy is the unauthorized copying and redistribution of a copyrighted material.


But Why Do People Pirate?


People pirate for a multitude of reasons, all unacceptable, but some more "valid" than others. Some of these reasons include:


Again, none of these reasons are valid excuses to break the law:

There really is no reason to break the law and pirate. No rational one at least.


Avoiding Piracy In The Wild


Not everyone has as sharp an eye for piracy as me, and it can't be expected that someone with no experience nor any idea of what piracy looks like should be able to spot it and avoid it; You can't expect someone who's never been taught that "stealing is bad" to avoid stealing. Luckily, piracy is rather easy to spot.

Piracy is usually an intentional activity, as it's fairly hard to participate in piracy on accident. It's possible to be a pirate ignorantly, but the pirate must take some action to infringe on someone's copyright for it to be piracy. This is quite nice for us copyright respecters, as it means we don't need to worry about infringing on anything in most daily activities. Piracy is NOT:

Piracy in most daily scenarios boils down to the dissemination of material through improper channels and without permission of the copyright holder. This means most interactions with pirates will take place at the point of distribution. This may happen online or offline, in-person or from half-way across the world. One easy way to tell if something is piracy or not is to ask yourself it it seems sketchy. If you have second thoughts about if this is what the owner would want, or if your safety is put at risk through the activity, it's probably piracy. If someone offers you a magazine for significantly cheaper than you'd expect, they're probably pirating the magazine. If you're offered cheap software through some sketchy website, it's probably piracy. Really, just use common sense and stay away from those weird dark corners of the internet. Here are some examples of what piracy IS:


Links, sites, and tech to avoid


Despite my best efforts, there will inevitably be people who will end up as pirates if not given EXPLICIT instructions on what to avoid.This section is intended to be a list of things to AVOID, NOT THINGS TO USE! I do NOT endorse piracy in any way, if I haven't made that obviously clear so far. Do NOT use these "services" (crime facilitators) to subvert the copyright protections of others. This is simply a list of things to AVOID!!!!


Torrenting


Torrenting, or the use of the BitTorrent Protocol, is not inherently illegal. It is perfectly legal to use the BitTorrent Protocol to share files with your friends or strangers, GIVEN THAT THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER HAS AUTHORIZED THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE CONTENT!!! For example, sharing Linux ISOs is perfectly fine because of Linux's GPLv2 License. This is NOT the case for, say, "Spiderman: Into the Spideyverse". Unless Sony comes out and says "WE DON'T CARE ABOUT SPIDERMAN ANYMORE, GO NUTS!", it is piracy (and illegal!) to download or redistribute any Spiderman movies using the BitTorrent protocol (or any information transmission protocol for that matter).

Some examples of illegal torrenting sites / trackers include:

There are far more torrent trackers that I could have listed, but they'd pale in comparison to these 3 titans. Generally, you'll know if a website is a torrent tracker because it won't be shy about telling you. If it IS shy about telling you, it's a private tracker, which you aren't getting invited to without doing a lot of torrenting (which you wouldn't do, because you're not a pirate!).

Torrenting Peripherals


Because of how the BitTorrent Protocol was written, it exposes your IP address to anyone else who's torrenting a file you're uploading/downloading. This is great news for us pirate haters, because this means copyright holders can get a pirate's IP and report them to their ISP for copyright infringement and get their internet shutdown. If someone is a big enough pirate they may even get a visit from our boys in the FBI. Unluckily, most pirates know about the dangers of their craft and work to circumvent these efforts to shut them down.

Some of these services include:

The earlier links that ended in ".onion" are links to Onion Sites, special sites hosted using Tor. To access an Onion Site, one must use the Tor Browser Bundle / Tor Browser. More tech savvy readers may know that sites hosted using Tor are on the Dark Web; By the way, I2P counts as the Dark Web too! If that's not enough of a reason to avoid them, I don't know what is!


Non-Torrenting Piracy Sites


Not every piracy site uses torrenting to distribute their ill-gotten goods. Some sites distribute materials directly, while others use other technologies to disseminate their illegitimate copies. Some of these sites include:

Again, there are many more examples of non torrent-based piracy sites, but if I were to list them then we'd be here all day. Pirates regularly have their domains seized and are forced to either go dark and take their site down or switch to another domain. It's likely that all the domains I've listed will be different or defunct within a year (here's hoping!). Going on a pirate hunt is a lot like trying to kill the hydra, kill one pirate and 3 more hop out of the hole you blasted through their ship, each with a new domain to shoot down.


Other Miscellaneous Piracy Techniques


Some methods of piracy do not use torrenting or some other random website, but instead use a piece of illicit software dedicated to the goal of piracy. These pieces of software can be harder to shoot down by copyright holders due to legal loopholes that allow them to skirt by. Hopefully organizations like the RIAA can get these hideous blemishes on the books wiped from the record.

 - YouTube Piracy Tools
YouTube, one of the largest video sharing platforms in the world, has a piracy problem. Not only are pirates uploading content to YouTube without proper authorization, they're also creating tools to download videos as .mp3/4's so they can redistribute those as well. Some of these tools include:


 - Ad-Blocking
Ad-blocking is a form of piracy where the intrinsic social contract between the user of a site and the site administrator of "User will watch ads to pay for the Administrator's site so that they may keep serving the user" is broken by preventing ads from showing -- thus preventing ad revenue from being claimed by the site admin -- while still loading the rest of the website. This is unacceptable, as running a website is not only difficult, but costs money! (Trust me, it's both.)

Some of the most popular ad-blocking software includes:


 - Other notable apps/methods
As it turns out, the internet isn't just YouTube! There are other platforms with their own pirate problems. There are too many possible piracy methods for me to point out every single one, but I will occasionally update this section with other notable apps or methods used to pirate, and which service the app/method impacts.


Closing Remarks:


While piracy may never come to an end, I hope I have convinced you to give up any future piracy you may have potentially committed. Maybe I was so convincing as to have you share this article around and spread the word of anti-piracy to the masses. If I can have even one person swear off piracy forever, I will be satisfied with my efforts. I hope this guide has been helpful in your journey to become a better person and better netizen. Remember, piracy kills!