U.S. Government Crackdown on Piracy Sites

Ok, let's be honest; most everyone these days gets their music by downloading it illegally.  While most think this is an activity that isn't that serious and is just kind of frowned upon like going five miles per hour over the speed limit it is, in fact, definitely against the law.  In the recent times this issue is getting more and more attention as we have learned in class.


In order to understand this issue it is first important to understand how downloading illegally works and kind of what it is.  Basically there are programs out there you can get for free that are known as torrent programs and they do what is called "seeding".  This means they are sharing your digital files, usually media files, all over the internet for other people to grab.  Torrent programs also work the other way by downloading those digital files to your computer, all you have to do is run a search for what you want and the torrent program looks for people who are seeding what you are looking for and downloads the file.  There are also torrent websites which are just sites that are just giant databases of torrents that you can download from.  Obviously there are some upsides and downsides to this kind of activity.  On one hand you can get stuff for free, but on the other this activity is an infringement of copyrights and is ILLEGAL!  Also there is the threat of downloading some really nasty things like viruses to your computer because you don't really know what people out there are seeding.


In just the past week the U.S. government Department of Homeland Security seized over seventy torrent sites in an new effort to get rid of online piracy.  I'm not sure of the exact legal specifics that allowed the government to do this but now when a pirate goes to one of these torrent websites instead of finding a link allowing them to download their intended file they see a warning sign from the government explaining that the site has been seized.

Perhaps this is a new wave of force from the government as they wage war against online pirates and this notice is seriously one intimidating warning that I expect will hit the nerves of many illegal down loaders.