I have a confession to make: I used to download pirated games, films and music.
I don't have any of it any more, good Lord no. In fact I now own every game and almost every piece of music I ever pirated in the first place. Call it penance. One day I realised that all of those games, films and pieces of music were the hard work of other people who put time, effort and money into creating them. I felt pretty terrible at the idea that I'd basically taken their creative works and given nothing in payment.
So I deleted it all.
Nowadays I find myself being more and more up in arms about the piracy issue, mostly with video games. I'm quite embarrassingly reactionary about it sometimes. I get so sick and fed up of the excuses.
"I can't afford games, so I pirate them. It's not like I'd be able to pay for them anyway so what difference does it make to the company?"
"DRM is the cause of piracy, I pirate games because I hate all the intrusive DRM that publishers and developers add to their games these days."
"Video game publishers are corrupt and charge too much for games. If they lower the price I'll buy them."
I currently qualify as unemployed, unfortunately, and I live in an area so poor that if a new business that isn't a take-away lasts more than six months they deserve an award. I have a wife who's on maternity leave and a brand new baby son. You could say that our purse strings are sufficiently tight and rightly so. We almost threw a party at the discovery that we can afford Christmas this year and yet I don't pirate games. I wonder why?
Do I find it difficult to work out bittorrent, or to find my way around pirating websites? Nope. Thankfully I have a good idea of right and wrong and I know that stealing is most definitely the latter. Stealing can be acceptable if you're starving, because someone should be feeding you, but media is a luxury. No one's going to die by not owning The Witcher 2 and yet it's been pirated almost four times as often as it's been bought.
That brings me to the next argument: DRM.
Back when Indie dev 2D Boy released World of Goo they made it DRM free as an "experiment". In response to such a trusting decision the gaming community went ahead and did we all surely expected it to do: pirated dat shit.
Soon after it was reported that World of Goo had seen an 82% piracy rate. Not only was it DRM free, you can buy World of Goo for £6.99 on Steam. I'm unsure about how much it was at release, but it's an indie game. It wont have been £50.
Leading me neatly to the "costs too much" argument. Pirates often bring this up as if they're freedom fighters, battling to loosen us from the grip that the corporations have over our lives.
Talking to the pirates here, you feel the need to own these things so badly that you steal it en masse. You've been fooled into thinking that games, films and other media are necessary to lead a full life. Basically you're stealing their stuff for two reasons: you've a weak moral compass and their advertising works on you.
I've had a pirate accuse me of being a banker, because I oppose piracy, in the same way you'd accuse someone of being a child molester. That shows two things: how low on the social chain bankers are currently and how bat shit insane people can act on the internet. The basis of the accusation was that I was more interested in keeping companies afloat than I was in the interests of "the people". Hilarious.
No matter what the argument is, it's a smokescreen. Piracy isn't the symptom of poverty, DRM, or evil corporations it's the symptom of entitlement. These days we can get a hold of almost anything at the touch of a button. You want Crysis 2, Machine Gun Preacher and the top 50 albums on -insert pirate site here- (many of which you'll never listen to)? You can download them right now, free of charge.
Never mind the writers, lyricists, musicians, actors, coders, designers, editors, producers and anyone else who put hard work into generating these luxuries and pieces of art and whose wages rest in the hands of the companies who publish them.
Just you take it for free. There's a good thieving slave-child.
