Saturday 8 February 2003

Pic of the day: Actual picture from the anime Hikaru no Go (the one about a boy and a ghost playing Go). I wholeheartedly agree with his conclusion.

Downloads and copywrongs

Please bear with me. Now, as so often, there is a small thing in my life, and then my thoughts just expand outward, until they touch the shores of Heaven and Hell themselves.

It started as my Internet Service Provider mailed me with the happy news that they have expanded their range of ADSL services. The one I have now gives me 128 Kbits upload and 704 Kbits download up to 1 GB each month; after that, download is 64Kbits, or the same as ISDN. When I ordered this, it seemed like a generous amount. I was barely likely to download 1 GB in a month, and I didn't have any pressing need for speed. It was simply to have a fixed (and lower) sum to pay, since we pay per minute for local calls here in Norway. I save a lot on this. But these last two months I exceeded the 1 GB limit in a couple days, because of the anime.

There are two generic add-on services available. One is 5 GB extra download for NOK 99, or ca $14. (5 GB might sound like a lot, with a 55 GB hard disk, but it also counts all the small invisible messages that pass between computers in a peer-to-peer network. These add up – I could see the "download" count rising even while just uploading.) The other is NightSurf, where I might download at full speed from midnight till 9 AM regardless of the 1 GB quota. It only costs NOK 49, or $7, but it's for each month. Besides, it's not necessarily the time I need it the most!

The next step up is a subscription for 10 GB per month, also $14. This may seem like a better alternative than buying 5 GB for the same price, but you have to pay for each month whether you need it or not. I'm not sure how fast you can change between these, but probably a lot slower than I change interests. My personal fads tend to last 2-3 weeks or so.

Then there's upgraded ADSL, with 1024 Kbits download and 256 Kbits upload. You also get a limit of 30 GB download – about the same as free space on my hard disk today. It would cost $28 more per month, compared to the subscription I have now. The obvious benefit is that with 256 Kbits upload, I could really make a difference in sharing fansubs. This, of course, stresses the question of whether I should do so in the first place.

***

There are two sides of this, the legal and the moral. In an ideal society, there would be no difference. But ideal societies are far between, as one person's ideal is another's nightmare. The higher your Internet traffic, the more likely that you will call attention to yourself from the anti-piracy groups. These are not likely to consider morality in the least. In Denmark, which is just across the strait from where I live, a number of citizens have already been forced to pay for downloading music and video content through peer-to-peer programs. I am not sure how this would work in my case, since I take care to only download content that is not available in Norway, or even in the USA. The anime I download exist only in Japanese, if at all ... some of them are old TV series that were never sold separately. If I could buy legally, I would ... I've done so with software, even going out of my way to the point of having a friend in America buy for me and send by air mail.

As a programmer and wannabe writer myself, I am very serious about copyright and protection of content. I set out to do unto others as I would have others do unto me. Obviously I wouldn't want them to steal my stuff because they were cheapskates. On the other hand, I don't care whether people find some use for stuff I have abandoned, and I've tolerated that people develop my product further. This happened to my debt collection software, possibly the best on the Norwegian market in the 90es. Rather than upgrading it for Y2K, I let my reseller take it to another developer, who re-engineered it in another database tool. The difference from my original version was so substantial that I have not tried to collect any royalties from the next generation. Of course, I don't depend on it for my livelihood these days, but I'm hardly a rich person by Scandinavian or even American standards. (Compared to most Ethiopians, of course, I'm pretty well off!)

***

Despite my pretty pale conscience, there is always the risk that some legality might snare itself around my foot, and uploading large quantities of anime might become very very expensive if faced with a sufficiently ruthless lawyer. (Are there any others?) Unlike some less technically minded people, I don't live in the illusion that the Net is a dark and foggy place where no one can see what you are doing. The morons. It is like a large city but at day. People don't bother what you're doing as long as they are not particularly looking for you; but once you draw attention to yourself, you're not alone in your living room anymore.

And drawing attention to myself is what I do here every day, is it not?

I'd like to say something more about copyrights and copywrongs, especially as pertains to the music industry (which I don't trifle with, incidentally). But I want my entries to be so short that they can be read during a lunch break. Thus, the further approach to Heaven and (especially) Hell will have to wait. God willing, I'll be back.