Piracy is back in the news again, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8328820.stm .

Personally I don’t download stuff illegally, I may have in the past, but now I don’t, for a few reasons, in no particular order:

• Too much like hard work! Sorting out ports on the firewall, virus checking everything twice, simply finding what you are looking for!
• I don’t pay the ISP bill and the person who does is against piracy very strongly, so I respect his choice.
• It’s wrong! Well it is. Everyone knows it is.

Thing is, there’s lots of good reasons to download stuff, and the funny thing is, its the people who make the stuff, who also make the reasons.

DRM - Something I have to contend with these days, why? BECAUSE I ACTUALLY PAY FOR THE STUFF. Seriously, the stupid movie advert you get on every DVD. The only people who see that are people who buy it. The people who download every movie off the net don’t even know it exists, so what does it achieve except piss me off? Nothing. Same with SecureROM, and all the others on software, do game pirates have to register their installs online with SecureROM? Of course the don’t. So what does that achieve? IT PISSES ME OFF!

No refunds. Stuff isn’t cheap. But the vast majority of this stuff is nebulous in nature, it’s worth is based on opinion, not like a bar of gold, and people are hesitant to pay out when they don’t know what their opinion will be till they got it open and watching/listening/playing  this leads to the big corporate lie the one they love so much and you hear all the time:

“Piracy is costing *insert industy here* 70 Squjillion £/$/€ a year/month/minute”

What a load of horse crap. The way they make this huge “shocking” number is by guessing how many people are downloading stuff, I know its a guess because if FACT knocked on your door would you let them come in and count the films on your hard-drive? NO! So its a GUESS. Then muliplying that number by the RRP of the DVD on the one day of the year it’s not on offer at HMV. Then they put all these numbers they have, add some zeros on then end (cos, you know, it can’t hurt). Then shout them as loudly as possible at any dumbass journalist willing to listen.

When it comes down to it though, it’s a big fat lie. Most of the people pirating these things wouldn’t be walking down to Game to buy it if the pirating avenues where closed to them, 1) they have forgot where their legs are, 2) they would have to go outside.

They just wouldn’t bother with it at all. Of a course few would, but every time something gets pirated it brings it into the hands of someone who later decides to buy it, because they know they like it and my guess is, it would balance out.

The simple fact is the vast majority of people will buy products that are reasonable:

• Reasonably easy to get hold of
• Reasonably priced
• Do what they are supposed to, reasonably well.

Simple fact is that all the companies are doing these days is generating bad feeling with their customer base, and the sooner they start listening to their customers rather than their lawyers the better they will do. But they won’t