Understanding Pirates

Whenever a digital product's sales slump, piracy is blamed before all else. Product quality, customer satisfaction, etc. are all neglected in favor of targeting the evil pirates who probably would not have purchased the product in the first place (had piracy not been an option). However, there is a glimmer of hope. One game developer decided to have a talk with pirates to better understand the motivation behind their actions. Ironically, DRM was a huge factor. Video game consumers hate nothing more than having to grapple with the DRM demons, and even many honest customers turn to piracy to strip away the copy protections on games they legitimately purchase (I know I have before).

Defective by Design

Businesses love to rant and rave about how DRM "opens up new business models", but all it does is prepare customers for an untimely doom. What happens when the license servers go down? What happens when that business goes bankrupt or decides the servers are not worth maintaining anymore? Basically, there is nothing we can do.

The problem is that these businesses have a fundamental misunderstanding of where the market is headed. Piracy is an unpleasant reality haunting copyright holders, but it is clear indication of how people want to consume content.

Piracy is *a* problem but not *the* problem

I recently stumbled across two excellent articles discussing the issue of piracy primarily in the gaming market (with some mention of the music industry). The first one written by Rob Fahey discusses ways that publishers can defeat pirates by offering strong incentives for purchasing games legitimately as opposed to combating piracy directly through restrictive, customer-unfriendly protections.

The reality is that when pirates are offering a better user experience than you are, your business model is broken - and rather than punishing your loyal customers, or whinging to national governments in the hope that they'll cover your backside with unpopular, civil liberties-infringing legislation, you need to fix your business model. Or find a new job.

The second article points out that piracy is never the sole reason (or even a big reason) a game sells poorly; it points out how many games today sell quite well despite lacking any form of copy protection.

The Rise and Fall of EA's DRM

Not too long ago, EA announced plans to "protect" its games Mass Effect and Spore for the PC using a system called SecuROM, which requires online validation at the time of installation and every 5-10 days thereafter. Fortunately, fans made quite a ruckus (many going so far as to express plans to blatantly pirate the games instead of pay for them), and EA decided to back down.

Stephan Kinsella - Rethinking Intellectual Property

Since this blog is brand new, I have to play catchup for while. There are many items I want to post here; I will have to backtrack a bit to do it.

Stephan Kinsella is a patent attorney with a presentation entitled Rethinking Intellectual Property Completely. The video is almost an hour long, but the actual presentation (before an excellent Q&A session) is about half an hour.



http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=280262988255234681&hl=en
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080504/2229041029.shtml

Blogs > Bookmarks

I find myself collecting hundreds of links relating to ongoing issues surrounding Intellectual Property and copyright. I figured it was time to gather that useful information into one public place. :)