The Pirates Prerogative

Justification
Attempting to justify piracy is really an act of futility, you just simply can't find a foolproof reason for why it's alright for someone to illegally download a product. Having said that, there are many reasons why people will attempt to explain why they believe pirating is OK. The most simple reason stems from the fact that it is too expensive to purchase all of the products that consumers want, so for the lack of funds and/or being unwilling to pay for something, it would be much easier for them to decide to download illegal content. As I've heard from some people, "It's too easy to pirate and I don't think it's wrong." This is the mindset of many people and it just becomes a habit to download something when it's so easy to do so. On the other end of the spectrum we can find those that will take a higher ground approach to pirating saying its alright, because they are just testing a game out. These people view pirating as a form of rental because the player would much rather find out if a game is actually good or not before they would waste about $60 to buy a bad game. So these people will still buy the game or other content, but not before testing it out first for free.

One of the biggest arguments that is usually made about piracy is that it is a form of sharing. While this makes sense when it's just one or two people, through the use of the internet it can then reach thousands of people. Torrenting sites such as the PirateBay and other sources allow for this to happen and they have become the focus of the debate. When the internet was still in it's infancy and the first boom occurred, many people were using the program known as Napster to share music and it was very common for people to use it. Once the program was shut down though, many people became more aware of the consequences of piracy. Despite the removal of Napster, the ability to pirate digital content is still relatively simple and painless compared to the price of purchasing something. No matter what the methods are or the rationalization for pirating, there will always be those who find a way to obtain digital goods for free.

The concept of ownership
Throughout the world, the concept of ownership is viewed differently from each nation. The United States, being a striking example of capitalism has a large contribution to the thoughts of ownership of property and in Europe, the mindset of having rights over what you have created is closely aligned to the U.S. Where things become complicated is when you look at huge countries such as China and realize that their concept of ownership is much different than ours. Despite the governments push in China to prevent piracy, the culture still believes that what you have created ought to be shared with others. In the Soviet Union there was so way to establish copy rights, so this explains why the creator of Tetris initially didn't get much credit for what he created and so many people where able to copy his game. For many countries outside the U.S., capitalism is more loosely defined and only as the rate of production increases does the need to protect intellectual property increase as well.

Endless Cycle
It feels at times as if it were impossible to find a solution to this problem, because what starts initially as a person defending themselves from piracy because of products that have poor quality and are too expensive, when the value of a product increases, the pirate will still obtain the product because they actually will admit that they are too cheap to buy something. It varies greatly from one pirate to another what their motivations are, but more often than not, it’s based on a refusal to pay a sum of money for a product that they believe is too much. Companies will try to add value to a product, but this doesn't change much so then they begin to result to other methods. These other methods involve increasing prices and limiting the ease of use of their products in order to prevent those who pirate games from using it to its full extent. There are many examples of this in the past and recent examples as well.

In the world of PC gaming, where piracy is most prevalent, any sign of an implied threat is seen as a form of betrayal from developers. PC gamers have many expectations of what a PC game should have and standards having been made with pricing and the core features of a game such as having dedicated server support for online matches. One of the most alarming changes that players have seen for PC games is Activision's choice to price Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 on the PC for $60. This pricing choice goes against the expected price point of new blockbuster PC games being only $50. On top of that, many features that are viewed as being standard in a PC title were removed in order to make it more similar to the console version of the game. More value was removed by not offering any collectors editions for the title on the PC and this would add up for more reason for people to pirate the title, making it the most pirated title of 2009. When ever players feel betrayed by developers, their response will be much worse than normal.

Response
In response to the increased rate of piracy many developers are taking on more extreme practices in order to protect their games from piracy. The methods they are using could be described as draconian in nature because the methods being used severely punish even the users that have purchased the product and have obtained the game legitimately.

Publisher and developer Ubisoft has shown the level of desperation that has come out of the battle to fight off piracy. With the release of Assasins Creed II on the PC and other future titles, Ubisoft has decided to use a new form of Digital Rights Management (DRM) that allows the game to operate only when the user has a constant internet connection and the servers from Ubisoft are online as well. This of course means the moment anything goes wrong with the internet connection, everything will cease to function and the player will even lose their current progress since they have last saved their game. This kind of strict protection has actually lead those who would normally purchase a game to pirate the game in order to avoid these issues.

Pirates have of course found a way to circumvent these restrictions by disabling the always on DRM that is found in Assassins Creed, thus enabling even more people to pirate the game pain free and also helping those who have purchased the game to be free of the DRM issues. All of this goes to show that no matter what you do to prevent the piracy of a game, dedicated groups of people will find a way to circumvent these protection methods and release these tools to the public. Noting this, it's very important for the industry going forward to find ways that promote the legal purchasing of games and at the same time may gamers aware that piracy is not acceptable.