A friend of mine just about downloads the world.

You see her study and there isn’t one software package box as she buys squat. It’s a challenge to her to get around activation codes and serial numbers and registration code problems which is quite impressive in a way. As for guilt about doing that, she has none. If you mentioned to her that she was ripping off the author’s she’d just shrug and come out with some meaningless excuse that justifies nothing. She has no understanding of intellectual property rights at all. I do download some ‘demo’ stuff but I also buy software when I want a full working version.

Whereas the friend of mine just doesn’t think like that. As far as she is concerned the ripped software or music or DVD is out in the public domain and it’s free from now on and that’s that. She does download a lot and it makes me wonder whether her ISP is keeping track of all of her download broadband usage. It wouldn’t be hard for them to monitor the big downloaders and keep totals of data being transferred via specific ports or protocols.

Aren’t these downloading guys putting up a flag, ‘here I am but please don’t check what I am downloading’. OK let’s see what she’s downloading that’s gigabytes in size? There’s a couple of files on Usenet and a couple on Bittorrent. Suppose it could be a film of their cousins wedding (What two cousins wedding videos downloading concurrently all month long, yeah right. Ed). The ISP can see what the file is and from what site and then use that information to find the same file on the same site to find out what exactly is being downloaded. Oh lookee here, it’s Shrek 3 and Live Free or Die Hard. Gotcha.

Too easy.