Your Pipes Are Not Clean

These days, it’s pretty easy and not all that expensive to find and stream quality movies, television, and music right to your living room. So you would think that the habit of ripping off content via file-sharing networks would be on the decline. Think again. According to recent study, “the amount of bandwidth used for copyright infringement in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific has grown nearly 160% from 2010 to 2012, accounting for 24% of total Internet bandwidth.” And this isn’t just some obsessed teenager downloading a really, really big file. In January of this year, “327 million unique users illegally sought copyrighted content, generating 14 billion page views on websites focused on piracy.” It seems like some of these numbers could be a litte inflated. I’m going to see if I can steal a more accurate report.

+ Don’t feel too bad, at least when you’re stealing all that content, you’re giving companies like Netflix a lot of good data about what shows to create.

+ There will always be something irresistible about getting content for free. One of the formative periods of my adolescence took place during a week when my friends and I figured out how to descramble a cable channel. From the archives: It was the week my friend Mordy became a hero…