Is Internet Piracy as risky as its made out to be in 2018?

Every user who have used Torrenting in the past few years knows that there is an inherent risk in getting involved in the activity i.e. the Government or copyright trolls can send you a financial or a litigation notice if they find you downloading material that is copyrighted.

Usually, most of this tracking is intended to happen by tracking down the IP addresses of users who indulge in Torrenting. But the main problem here is that, users do know that Torrenting can put them at risk of such situations but no one satisfactorily knows as to the overall effectiveness of such programs that intend to protect content piracy.

Simply put, no one knows how much chance there is of getting caught.

The fact is, entertainment houses, especially the bigger ones, are investing millions of dollars each to protect their content against such piracy. Even almost every single country has laws against it, but why it is that the number of users who get caught in actuality is too tiny to notice?

The answers probably lie in these issues mainly:

The Pool is too big to tackle as compared to the budgets:

We often believe that Torrenting can easily get us in trouble, yes it can, but the chances of that happening are much, much lesser than you can imagine. Just in 2016, nearly 24% of users resorted to pirating the movies while it was still being screened, but how many cases of users do you remember that have cornered for doing so? The answer will most likely be none.

This is because, the number of users who indulge in media piracy online is so huge that even the exorbitant budgets of these big media houses start to look miniscule in comparison to them. There are probably a 100 million regular Torrenting users out there, so you need a lot bigger budget allocation than the one being currently given to tackle them all.

VPNs overhype the issue:

Go to any major VPN provider’s site and the chances are that it will have promoted its effectiveness towards protecting you from the getting caught while Torrenting. Yes, a VPN is necessary while Torrenting and there many potent Torrenting VPNs that can reduce the risk to an almost non-existent value but its not that if you don’t use a VPN, you will get caught the next day.

Major VPNs are run by commercial entities so their main aim is to maximize sales and since their target market persona is so small, they sometimes tend to overhype issues in order to get the dollars chugging in.

The Governments are not too serious about it:

The US Government’s much hyped "Six Strikes" program to stave of piracy and discourage users from indulging in activities like Torrenting was called off early last year after 4 years of ineffective existence. The program failed to prevent or either bring much change to the number of people from using Torrenting. And we can give some marks to the US government for at least trying, others aren’t even doing that.

Apart from a few countries like Germany and some Nordic nations, not a lot of countries enforce their privacy laws online so stringently, which means that a big chunk of those who indulge in illegal Torrenting go scot free.

One of the other major reasons as to why governments fail to act against content piracy online is that, when such cases are presented in courts, the offenders mostly get away with lack of evidence as has happened in a case recently.

If this issue is to be tackled en-masse, then there is the need to develop not just a local or a national, but a global system that chucks out all such illegal traffic. Such a system can be built on the likes of the Chinese Firewall which has quite successfully blocked out a wide majority of internet traffic that their Government doesn’t like.

Otherwise, the threat of notices or legal litigation has been as successful in stemming the flow of Torrenting as the warnings on cigarette packets have been towards discouraging people from indulging in smoking. Its human psyche that people won’t react to calls to warning if the issue isn’t immediate. The same problem has plagued issues like Global warming, smoking etc. and the authorities are doing it all wrong with illegal piracy again right now.

What we need is a proactive approach rather than a reactive one, one which stops this activity from happening altogether rather than the one in place today that only discourages through fear and retribution, which in my opinion has been counterproductive and will continue to be so unless a net is cast wide enough to stop Torrenting users from indulging in the activity outright.

A passionate digital marketer who loves to share his eye-catching and versatile ideas regarding online advertisements and developing social media relationships.