What's the deal with Polish Piracy?

I steal torrents all the time. Mainly music and comic books, a few pdf's I can't find elsewhere, but rarely software and never movies. I read recently that 57 percent of the software installed on Polish computers is illegal. That seems high. Also, I notice when I'm pilfering torrents, that many of the trackers are Polish-based. Is this a result of lax enforcement, a cultural more, or what? I'm just curious.

Six factors, any one of which is sufficient. A mismatch between price and income. A history of having to get round scarcity. A history of having to circumvent the law. A philosophy that it's OK to do something if you can get away with it. The belief that if someone doesn't protect their property from being taken it is available to take. A tradition that if something doesn't obviously belong to one person, it belongs to nobody.

Sound reasoning. I understand there was quite a backlash against recently proposed legislation aimed at curbing such widespread flagrancy.

If they care about people pirating stuff, they should care even more about Polish people having to exchange several times x more work for merely being allowed to watch a movie or play a game than westerners.

Leaking out valuable work this way is much worse than watching a movie/using a program without permission.
The whole IP trade with countries with lesser consumption entitlement - where a working person is entitled to consume a lesser amount of goods for his/her work, is a massive scam.

It's like selling worthless shiny baubles to negroes in exchange for valuable resources

Scam? Why is it a scam? Why doesn't Poland produce stuff for her citizens at an affordable price?

By your logic, poor people in the West should pay less for their consumption than rich people.

Crack on, the internet wasnt designed as a money making cartel for Americans.
Who made Uncle Sam global www copper anyway? Its not even as though its an American invention.......

What you are talking about? That Poland should produce our own version of say "windows 7" and "Kill Bill" at an affordable price?


It's easy to a cynic ashole when you live in firstworldia with money and comfortable life that it brings...

The reason is a complete failure of the entertainment industry to keep up with modern times and control/licence their content at a sensible cost, combined with culturally less moral-high ground seeking one-upmanship nonsense in Poland compared to the UK and USA.

Huh,what part of the UK do you live in lol? ( dont worry,I checked,darn sarf somewhere,no? ;) )


Yeah,urm, you do know the streets are not really paved with gold dont you?

Isthatu2: yes it is 'daarn saarf', but I'm a Yorkshireman that only moved recently. And indeed, there is a difference. If you go into an office up north and tell your colleagues that you've knocked off a 30 year old song by someone who's now dead; they'll generally proceed with an interesting discussion about the song. Daarn saarf however, they might lecture you on how much morally better they are than you because they recently bought it via itunes (having previously bought it on cassette & CD at some point).

Just a few things I need to say.

First of all, the only reason the Music and Movie industries are so adamant about the internet is because they can now no longer charge us 70 or 80 bucks (ridiculous!) for some piece of movie that they took a couple of months to shoot.

They are mad that they can't keep churning out the same fecal matter year after year and charge ridiculous prices for that. They're scared that the idea of media becoming primarily software-related will mess up their numbers big time!

And let's be clear, they are attacking not piracy but the internet itself when they do things like shut down filesharing sites.

Think about it: why are companies so adamant about this? Is it really because they are losing so and so amount of money? NO, it's because if things keep going as they are, then they won't be able to make an income which is WAY TOO MUCH COMPENSATION considering the job that they already do.

Think about it: these industry people, what is their job really? They hire a couple of Goldsteins and Goldenbergs to figure out what the teenie bopper/idiot housewives will fall for next and pay billions for and then they try to turn that sh!t into a fad so that everybody buys into it.

With online file-sharing the way that it currently is, these man-children who make billions by subverting the masses will no longer be able to do so.

How many years does it take to become an engineer? A doctor? A professor? How many years do people have to put into their career in order to become something that benefits society and make a good salary at the same time?

Now compare THOSE people (doctors, engineers, professors, etc...) to the big movie/music execs....what's the difference? one of those groups works hard to have a prestigious and respectable and DIFFICULT job....the other? They cobble together a bunch of 12 year old twinks and trannies (Justin Bieber, Lady GaGa) and find some way to market this non-art sh!t to the masses.

Many of the tunes i download i have already owned at one point or another in the form of CD's - bought and paid for. CD's as great an invention as they may have been don't last for shite, so its not really illegal is it?

Haha, that explains everything tobster , yes,being in Gods own county I didnt recognise the whole moral up yerselfness as a *UK* trait ;)


Good point,most of us old farts (ie, over about 16 in computer terms :) ) just go round downloading stuff we have lost in house moves over the years :)

Isnt it just the modern version of making a tape of your LP(bought and paid for) so you can play it in the car or in your walkman?

You're actually paying for a licence to media when you buy it, not the plastic/magnetic strip or indeed transmission of bytes that gets it to your speakers. As far as I'm concerned, if I bought a song on CD/cassette in the past I'm completely within my moral and legal rights to knock it off the internet now.

And as for new stuff, if it's on the TV/radio every 30min then my TV licence has paid for it!

(...Your honour!)

Its was designed to survive a nuclear war against the communists... so effectively... it was.

Nope, thats the story told in hindsight by Uncle Sam.....
besides,its the www on computers that we talk about here,both British inventions.

A little something i stumbled upon: Google transparency report:



google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/

Do you think those have something to do with Jason? It's doubtful because there are millions of other people who could be responsible.

what! my post is relevant to the thread. Jason would need to be directly linked to the Polish and British government to have anything remotely related to the link. So no they dont have anything to do with Jason.

Its Google the largest search engine in the world with something like 90% of a global market share.

I misunderstood, WB. I thought you were implying Jason was somehow involved in getting the attention of these agencies with his accounts and posts and it showed up on Google. I thought how can you know it's him when there's so many other people it could be.

The link highlights the growing global phenomenon with regard to torrents (illegal downloads) among other things and lists the figures Google has to deal with. 5.8 million URL's (websites) have been requested to be removed from Google search engines by various organisations/factors/people.

I found it quite amusing that the Polish govs request had been turned down.

Google has POWER - real power, in the very sense of the world. Ive commented on here many times of how much of a fan i was with regard to Google and their business practices, lately im not so much of a fan.

Just think a couple of guys in a LA basement who had vision, a great idea and excellent IT skills could have become such a global powerhouse, in terms of regulating what the world sees online. They own youtube for fcuk sake. Google has the end say in what is published and what isnt. Like America with its founding principles Google I fear has become corrupt in search of power and money. Fortunately for us there are other well established search engines and i only hope they begin to compete as a result of Googles ever growing global domination.

I skimmed through your link and found that Google turns down many requests.

yeah they would wouldn't they, of course they would, its not a shut down URL fest. Plastic what are you trying to say? are you just being argumentative for the sake of it?

I am just saying Google doesn't seem to be in a censoring mood... ever.

Its not in googles best interests to remove search results form their engines, but what it does stringently search and remove is YouTube (because they own it) content especially musical content. Ive uploaded many vids that have not made it past the verification process, or revisited older vids that have been silenced under copyright laws.

Come on plastic youre just off of a Zeitgeist fest, youve seen first hand the stranglehold money has on the planet, google will not censor material which other search engines are still showing.

I bet the music industry puts the clamp on Google over copyright laws so Google tries to do more to stop copyrighted music from being aired. Google sees government as the enemy and might be more reluctant to cooperate with it.

These agencies would, most likely, appeal to as many search engines as possible so they wouldn't see something on one search engine that isn't on another.

duhh ya think plastic, blatantly obvious 101 scenario - of course thats the reason....


Perhaps - but that remains to be seen, their advertising industry is certainly pro democracy as to their long term goals we will not know as yet. I suppose the fundamentals question is: have the founders been corrupted by money and power and if so have they lost their founding principles? are they good guys? and if so in what sense, the survival of the human race can come down to decisions made by people with real power, Google has power, globally influencing power. In any case i believe Google is bound by the laws of the United States, as big as they may be they do have governing laws controlling them.


Bann one bann all, Google has a massively overwhelming market share so the ball starts there. Different search engines, different countries, you cant order a global bann for certain URL's on all search engines as yet.