Here There Be Pirates

Piracy.

Nowadays, it has a cool vibe. People love to talk like pirates. We have those movies with Jack Sparrow. Piracy is considered "cool".

Maybe that's why piracy of software, especially games, is so widely accepted?

Almost everyone would say that stealing is bad. And almost everyone I know has pirated at least a few items of intellectual property. Songs, movies, TV shows, and computer games.

There has been a lot of debate about the issues surrounding software piracy, these days. The big corporations keep implementing more and more invasive anti-piracy protection (generically called Digital Rights Management, or DRM), which tends to only punish the people who paid for the product. The pirates crack software easily, while the paying customers have to deal with tons of issues directly caused by the (ineffective) protection.

For example, I bought Bioshock when it was first released. I brought it home, naturally excited to dive right into such a highly anticipated game. However, when I put the game disc into my DVD drive, it failed to run. I continued to check, and tried all sorts of trouble shooting methods, but determined that it was only Bioshock that couldn't be read, and that although it could be read briefly, something was killing it from being accessed.

Next I checked on the web, only to find out that tons of people were having the exact same issue. It was well over a year before I could finally get the problem solved, and only then by buying a new computer. To this day I have no idea what prevented it from playing on my old one, but as a paying customer I was well pissed off.

Another time, I was living abroad when Spore was released. I bought a digital delivery version of the game since that was the only practical way for me to obtain it. I was soon dismayed to find out that during my entire life, I would only be able to install my copy of Spore three times. Ever. This was highly offensive to me, once I realized what I had paid full price for. (This was later updated to be more generous, but that's beside the point.)

Some few companies have a novel approach to the issue. Stardock, for example, points to the ineffectiveness of "protection" efforts, and acknowledges that this tends to work only as a punishment for paying customers.

Stardock generally doesn't use any DRM for their software, but any software updates have to be downloaded directly from them, and require a purchased license in order to do so. I like this business model; they provide a base product that works but then they continue to make it better through extensive post-release updates. It does not treat the customer like a criminal.

Also, it in essence turns pirated versions of their software into really good demos, requiring you to pay to get access to the updates. I would be interested in knowing how many people pirated their stuff first, really liked it, and ended up paying to buy the license and get updates.


In order to provide an alternative to the invasive DRM options currently available, Stardock has developed a new form of software protection: Game Object Obfuscation (GOO). You can read about it here. It sounds interesting, and certainly appears to be better than the other alternatives.

And though Stardock's unusual policy of no DRM is commendable, I can sympathize with developers who think that's a scary prospect. Because like it or not, piracy is entrenched and popular.

One thing I see again and again is the rationalization of piracy. I am sick and tired of the flimsy justification for theft of intellectual property. If you pirate software, don't try to justify it.

Realize that you're stealing someone's property. And it isn't just a faceless corporation, but a team of  developers who are likely overworked and underpaid. I think that the anonymity of the internet allows the human element to disappear from the equation, which produces all the ridiculous lines used to explain why it is OK that you pirated your games.

Besides, people who come up with silly justifications sound really lame.