Best Defense Against Piracy: Enforce Existing Laws
Rock, Paper, Shotgun writes about the state of Russia's thriving (and growing) videogame industry - once threatened by rampant, open piracy:

The pirates were making a lot of money and weren’t likely to be stopped easily. They were mass-producing packaged copies that looked like real games, and were competing directly with the actual, licensed publishers for commercial product. 1C went as high as they could: to President Vladimir Putin himself. The man from the KGB soon realised just what value this burgeoning industry would be to his vast, developing country. The punishment for commercial piracy is now up to seven years in prison. A Russian prison. As disincentives go, it’s a good one.

With 300 people a year now jailed for software theft, piracy is rapidly disappearing quickly in the major cities of Russia. The Russian government have even managed to close some of the major torrent sites, and have published an anti-piracy guide to help retailers avoid getting burned by illegal distributors. It is a tough regime, but the Russian government know that they can’t allow crime to dominate their development: in gaming as much as anywhere else.

You can read part 1 of the article here.

This is a little different from what we're facing in the U.S. (fortunately for American software developers). People who consciously rip off software developers' livelihood for their own profit are a particular kind of scum quite worthy of staring at cell walls for a couple of years. This is obviously not the same case asa middle-schooler who swaps MP3s with her friends.

But it does illustrate the problem - piracy is generally considered a "risk-free" crime. There's a much greater risk of disappointing your friends by not sharing.

I'm as nervous of the idiocy of crackdowns as the next person, particularly with technologically illiterate grandmothers and young girls getting caught in the "stings" of the past by the RIAA.

But I think we need better enforcement of our existing laws (though can we get rid of the horrible DMCA, please?) by the folks who are supposed to be enforcing the law. This obviously drove piracy further underground in parts of Russia, as the risk outweighed the reward. The better we can do this, the more we can leave software companies free to actually reward real customers, rather than wasting their time and money and pissing off their customers trying to enforce the laws themselves with draconian DRM measures.

I dunno about you, but I'd much rather they spent those hundreds of thousands of dollars adding more content or performing a little better testing before releasing a game rather than implementing stupid DRM schemes that are more likely to prevent legitimate customers from playing their legally purchased games than stop pirates.

Labels: Politics

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 11:46 AM (Permalink)