Now here's an interesting
blog post over at Fragland. Called
Pirates at Bay, it details the recent Pirate Bay acquisition and the fallout over that. I'm no advocate of stealing software but I agree with the author of this article--punishing the paying customer with strangulating DRM and witchhunt-style lawsuits is the absolute worst way to deal with it, especially when the real pirates have the DRM cracked within a week of a game's launch. Closing down Pirate Bay won't solve the problem for long--software thieves will just find a new place to congregate. Waging a war on these unscrupulous individuals isn't the answer; developers like Valve and Stardock have a better idea in offering incentives and benefits to us paying customers, building loyalty instead of lawsuit fear.
Publishers talk a big game about preserving developers' right to profit from their work but you have to wonder how much of the millions of dollars go to the actual artists and code grinders in the trenches, and how much goes to the publisher CEOs. For the last 20 years publisher lobbyists have been saying that the videogame industry is on the brink of economic collapse all because of piracy, but here we are in 2009 and even in a recession the big publishers aren't anywhere close to shuttering. It's the smaller guys that get hit the hardest, and piracy is usually the least of their worries.
Anyway, check out the article. The author could tighten up their grammar a touch but otherwise it hits on all the important parts, albeit in a rant-sort-of-way.
