Yesterday the UK High Court ruled that infamous torrent site The Pirate Bay must be blocked from access by all UK internet providers due to copyright infringement issues. “The galaxy’s most resilient BitTorrent site” responded with a call to arms and a way around the oncoming ban.
AFACT’s loss in the high court on Friday brought to an end the current legal woes for iiNet, but it’s far from the end of the story. In the press conference held afterwards, iiNet’s Michael Malone repeatedly pressed home the point that a lot of the problems would go away if Australian content delivery mechanisms were better. I agree with him, but I’m left pondering if that won’t bring with it a whole new host of problems.
Those unscrupulous sorts pirating the recent PC release of Starbreeze’s Syndicate have found a little surprise buried inside the release. And it’s not some kind of punishment or DRM.
No Syndicate for Australia. That means you should just pirate the crap out of it, right? Stick it to those evil developers who hate your guts and are not at all trying to make a living or feed their families. They deserve it, after all?
When I was a kid, my Dad didn’t just condone piracy, he actively encouraged it.
“Why would ye pay 20 quid for a game when ye can get it for two pounds at the Barras?” He would ask. I was only nine years old. It was hard to argue with that logic.
Piracy’s a fact of life. As a defence against having their intellectual properties swiped, cracked and traded online like so many baseball cards, a lot of companies have turned to Digital Rights Management, a move that seldom does more than temporarily slow pirates and enrage paying customers. Fortunately, there’s a growing number of non-DRM related options out there for developers and software vendors to explore that’ll stymy piracy while respect the rights of their paying users. Let’s give ‘em a try.
Pirating new video games is a crime. But there’s long been a rather grey area around the piracy of old games. And when I say old, I don’t mean 2008 old. I mean 1988 old.
