The Industries Dilemma

Piracy has always been an issue for developers of software, games and all other forms of piracy, but only within the past couple years have developers been able to take a more active role in controlling how their products can be distributed and used. The use of digital rights management (DRM) has I have mentioned before allows companies to put restrictions on the use of a product and allow for authorization of purchased or illegal products. Prior to the use of DRM, companies had to be very smart about how they would release their products to stores or they would have to just simply accept the fact that there would be people that would end up distributing their products in unwanted ways. With physical media it was all but impossible to control what happened to a product after it left a store, except for direct intervention on part of authorities. As computers became more popular in the late 90s, the rapid spread of all physical media into digital form made things even worse, but as mentioned, recently DRM technology has offered a solution to the problems of piracy, whatever the cost may be.


There are many types of methods of using DRM on games and it has become a necessary evil for many games. While it's usually only found in PC games, increasingly so, console games have begun using DRM as well. An interesting example of DRM being used in a non PC game would be the recent release of SOCOM Fireteam Bravo 3 and it's inclusion of an online mode that is accessible only upon activating the game with Sony's Playstation Network, which behaves similar to Apples iTunes, but for games. The strategy here is that only people who have purchased the game will be able to receive a code necessary to enable to online mode and those who have downloaded the game illegally would have no way of obtaining a code. The developers of SOCOM aren't the only ones to take measures like this. Capcom recently released Final Fight for the PS3 and it will only work if the player is connected to the internet at all times so that the game can be authorized as belonging to them. In this case though, Capcom apologized for doing so, because while DRM is becoming more common for games, many still see it as a slight against consumers, especially when it affects those that have purchased it legitimately.

When we see these things happen, we wonder how companies could justify this, but the numbers showing the rate of piracy give us an insight into how bad the problem really is. It is estimated by the Entertainment Software Association that around 10 million people around the world were pirating games in December of 2010 alone. This is also seen as being a very low estimate as it cannot accurately trace all users and other forms of downloading digital content. While most of the piracy was found in countries that have poor regulation against piracy and defending intellectual property, this relates heavily to the United States as well. With this extreme rate of downloading for just video games, developers have every right to be concerned with the amount of revenue that is lost by piracy of their games. So now that is acceptable for DRM to be pushed on to games more so than ever, this also creates a reliance on digital distribution of games, so with everything being digital it ends up being easier for people to pirate games once they have found out how to circumvent the existing DRM. With all of these conflicting issues, it's important that we find a compromise for both parties and find the most pain free solution to the problem.

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.