here has been a lot of rhetoric flung back and forth between providers of content (be it books, games, music, or movies) and those who “pirate” them, but not a lot of dialogue.
Recently, Cliff Harris, an independent game developer decided to change that. He asked for e-mails that would answer the fundamental question: “Why do you pirate my games?”
What he got back was partly what he had asked for, but more of the answers seemed to address the broader issues of game piracy in general.
Remarkably, only a small portion of the answers fell into the “I don’t believe in intellectual property” crowd, or the “I like free stuff and am not likely to get caught” crowd. Even though these two groups tend to be among the loudest (or the loudest denounced) in the public Internet discussions on the matter, they apparently make up the small ends of the bell curve. (Though, granted, this is assuming the respondents were completely honest.)
The majority of the complaints fell into four areas that gave me a strong feeling of deja vu, as they are all complaints (or, in one case, an advantage) I have also heard voiced about e-books (and, for that matter, music and movies): price, quality, DRM, and convenience.
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