yarrr

I discovered last night that a student-authored book to which I was a contributor a few years back has been available via torrent for at least a couple of months now. Mininova lists the torrent as having been downloaded 1500+ times, which I dare say is more than the number of copies sold—the book's sales rank on Amazon is somewhere around a gazillion. I signed any possible royalty rights away to some stupid scholarship fund, but nonetheless, damn you pirates!

And, with the act being perhaps illegal and all, I absolutely did not download the book for myself just to check the quality. So, I did not learn that it was merely a mediocre scan job. Damn you pirates!

To this day the unexplained transmission of 22 November 1987 remains an historic curiosity, since it represents the last such signal of its kind… no other instance of a complete hijacking of a commercial broadcast has occurred in the US in the twenty years since. For now the mysterious masked Max Headroom lookalike remains at large, but his backside may never truly be safe from the mighty flyswatter of justice.

via
see also

National Geographic has an interesting article (and photo gallery) on modern day pirates in the Strait of Malacca.

Real pirates say "Allahu Akbarrr".

Continued...

Not only is p2p a threat to national security and starving artists, it's also putting professional pirates out of business.