Piracy and Copyright and DRM and Video Games!

Way back in Grade 7, I found out that my older sister was using Kazaa to download music. Back then, that was still a weird concept to me; all we really had to go on about it then was this scary video. Later that day, during recess, I found out that pirating was pretty popular. Although, "I wouldn't steal a car," I couldn't say pirating was quite the same- more like someone duplicating your car with some device from the future and driving off with that copy. Still, it was stealing in the way you-get-something-for-free-which-you-should-have-paid-for; the loss seemed more generalized, however, with the target not being a retailer or publisher, but for the every little part of the industry. Anyway, 'everyone else was doing it,' so I didn't really give it much more thought at the time.

Eventually, free music became the norm. Music was now a digital medium, with small MP3 files that could be so easily transferred through CDs, the internet, and the fancy new iPods and (then) competing MP3 players.

What I didn't expect was how quickly it began to happen to movies, video games- and basically anything could be stored in digital form. At the time, it seemed like there were a number of excuses for why it was OK to pirate music. Music was so small (in both size and cost), it was all available on the radio, performers get most of their revenue during concerts- not to mention they were probably rich to begin with... and the list goes on.

Movies and video games were gigabytes larger than music- so with the slower internet they were much more of an inconvenience to attain. As soon as this bandwidth became available, the piracy trend began to spread across all digital mediums. More expensive digital works were now also becoming easily freely available, and it was becoming clear that few ethics actually guided people's thoughts about pirating: that is, if you can get it free, you'll take it. It is a social norm, and people rarely think twice about it nowadays.

Naturally, worried corporations have begun to look for ways to protect their intellectual property; rightfully so, in my opinion. However, they often fail at finding a reasonable balance between this and customer satisfaction. Personally, I've always had a long-standing interest in video game development, so piracy often brings to mind the numerous successes and failures of applying DRM in the video game industry.

Publishers have tried using CD-codes (The Sims), limited installs (Spore), a constant internet connection (Splinter Cell Conviction), but none of these have prevented piracy- that is, people will always hack around it, and then share it.

I remember reading this article a while back, discussing the piracy rates of the indie game World of Goo. 2D Boy released the game on PC without any DRM, and they found that their estimated piracy rates (which were 90% of the played copies; you can read about their methods in the article) were about equal to another casual game Ricochet Infinity, which used DRM. This would indicate that using DRM protection does little to actually stop piracy, it just provides a minor barrier for pirates and cripples the paid users.

Furthermore, they estimated that only 1 of 1000 people who downloaded a game would have bought it otherwise. So, does DRM justify itself? For the end purpose of increasing revenue, and given that it is both ineffective and doesn't significantly increase sales, I'd say probably not.

Different companies have tried alternative approaches to DRM, such as Valve with Steam. Steam really is a DRM service, since games need to be activated on-line before playing, but this isn't a huge burden since most computers are able to get internet access at some point. However, Steam provides benefits for people who properly own the game. The user has access to a community of friends, playing and managing multilayer games is simplified , stat-tracking and public achievements are available. Not to mention, that once a game is associated with your account, you can download it through the internet onto as many computers as desired. Finally, it includes an offline mode, which is fair.

It seems sometimes the best counter-measure for piracy is to provide benefits for owning a real copy, through digital community and services, and make buying legit copies easier than pirating. I'll have to do some further research, however, to fully assess the impact of piracy, and perhaps statistically back up these claims. It does seem that since the explosion of Steam and other distribution services, PC gaming has started to rise again after a decline over the last few years (which some attribute to the ease of PC game piracy), but I'll save this topic for later.

(Images from Wikipedia)