Timothy Ubuntu

            Timothy Ubuntu came from a family of computer programmers, and it’s fair to say that he has loved computers since birth. On his 4^th birthday he asked for his computer to be able to run emacs so he would be able to program like his dad. You see, his dad was a website developer and computer programmer, but his mom didn’t do anything that fancy; she repaired computers. However, she was damn good at repairing and you would never be able to see someone defrag a hard drive that fast. Back to Timothy, his family wasn’t exactly the wealthiest so they had dial up and every time they would get online to do something or show Timmy the beauty of the internet the series of high and low beeps of AOL ate away at him. When he was finally on it for the first time he was amazed at what he could see, what he could do, what he could have, and especially what he could give.

            He loved music and games but didn’t have money to buy them so he would play online games. Free cheap ones because he couldn’t find the games he wanted online. Timmy eventually was overwhelmed by the lack of interesting games on the internet after he thought so highly of it and starting bawling.

            “Why? Why can’t I find anything fun? I thought it was all supposed to be here?” Timmy cried. Shortly afterwards Timmy’s father walks into the room and says

            “Timmy Why are you crying?”

            “Because I can’t find anything online. I can’t find games or music and I hate it”

            “Well son it pains me to see you like this so I will teach you the ways I get everything”.

From that moment on Timmy put all his effort into researching one man who his dad told him about, Sean Parker, the man who founded napster and broke the record companies.

            Sean Parker showed that you will never be able to stop the free flow of information while there are people out there will to do the same things he did and napster allowed to upload and download music for free. He was sued for creating it and charged hundreds of thousands of dollars but that didn’t scare Timmy so he looked up ways to download programs where we wouldn’t get caught. He asked his-self what would the safest way be to get music and games, and that’s when his dad told him about torrent files. It is one of the biggest peer to peer sharing types imaginable and he noticed his dad already had a program called bittorrent on their computer and just like that he began. He started downloading torrent files and running them and the speed at which we would get files put him and shock.

            “Its really free” Timmy asked.

            “Yes Timmy it is free and it’s there”.

            The only problem with this is that if the country cracks down they can still get your IP address and sue you like they did Sean Parker. They already sued one lady for uploading music to websites and was fined 220,000 dollars. Inconvenient as it may be, that day, December 4^th is when the Prop-IP act was first introduced to congress. The Prop-IP act was to increase the penalties for trademark and copyright infringement. Timmy and his dad knew that if it got passed they could be made examples of and forced to be gross sums of money. Sadly in the next 5 months it would only get worse. It had traveled through the house and the senate so quickly and had an astonishing voter turnout. It got passed 410 to 11. 5 months after that it was passed, and on 10/13/2008 George Bush signed the bill and it was passed. Interestingly enough people who torrented files have not been caught and everyday Timmy wonders about how effective the bill was and will download more files for old times sake.