rohitj's domain

So, yesterday I got a mail from bluehost saying that there are some copyrighted material on my site. I bought an account with bluehost in June/July 2007. I share it with some of my friends. One of them is bheekling who hates US copyright laws and the way they use it to exploit people. If you talk in favor of RIAA, he will probably kill you. . And he also prefers to play with these laws. … so anyways, when we bought the hosting space, we decided that we will not put any pirated material on the site. It so seems that initially we were in doubt that japanese animes are not copyrighted. But it so seems they are. Its not copyrighted in US though. So, US law can not make me remove them from my site. Anyways Bluehost guys said that I have the following thing on site, which I must remove. (they use the word “copy written material”. I have no idea what that means )

Now, “Movie” is surely copyrighted. bheekling uploaded that temporarily by mistake. He has removed.
This is my response to bluehost. Let us see what happens. :

So, this is how it works in IIT Kanpur. Most of the students use pirated softwares. That means the “MS windows” they use is pirated, “MS office” is pirated, “adobe professional” etc etc. There are plenty of pirated softwares available in IIT Kanpur LAN. Even if someone buys Windows or gets it with laptop, they use other pirated softwares. Name any software, it will be available in IITK LAN. Same is with movies and songs. And IITK administration doesn’t do anything against it. Its not that they don’t know about it, but its because they don’t wanna stop it. For example in IITK newsgroup people tell others that they have downloaded this pirated software/movie/song and have shared it here. Rather IIT Kanpur has made separate groups for sharing videos, music and softwares. Reason for this mass piracy being that 1 : IITK students are technically sound, 2: these software companies, they encourage piracy in developing countries and hence piracy is so common in India, 3: Indians, right now, don\’t want to spend money on softwares (why would they when pirated softwares are available so easily).

Whatever it is, it leads to wastage of time. Students who download these stuffs, spend days and nights searching for torrents and downloading them. And students waste time in watching these pirated movies and TV episodes. And some students spend hell lot of time in playing pirated games. Now this gaming is a big concern for administration. Because some students waste so much time in these things that they end up failing courses. Some students play games all night. Solution they have come up with is like this (you can see the original document here. ) : 1: No LAN (that means no internet as well) in night. 2 : no net for new students for 3 semesters. WTF!!! Do they want us to be technically dumb? I don\’t understand how can they think of life without internet today. Their fight is against missuse of internet, so fight against that. Why do you want to deprive the sincere students from internet. For example, those who want to chat with people in USA, what will they do? I like to work in night. What will I do? My gentoo takes 2 days to install, how will I install it? Institute Computer Center is not a convenient place to do these stuffs. Give freedom to students. Stop piracy in campus and all these problems will be solved. Those who are involved in downloading/gaming etc, will be discouraged greatly.