Bloody Pirates

Blog post 4

"Bloody pirates!", said by both Elizabeth and Ragetti in the movie Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, is one of my favourite phrases in the movie since it sounds funny, is short, and easy to remember.

After hundreds of years, piracy has evolved from stealing goods and killing innocents to "stealing" (debatable term) virtual commodities and "killing" (debatable term) people's source of income. The question of why anyone would spend money on something that they could otherwise obtain for free is something that I consider an open-ended philosophy. On one hand it may seem like virtual commodities is no different from physical commodities, and one is stealing if s/he obtained the item for free when other people paid for it. On the other hand, most pirates will argue that they indeed bought the good at full price, and is only "sharing" it with others, just like how one could buy a TV and share it with his friends, instead of having each friend buy a separate TV. Then the argument deepens into the fact there is no such thing as "sharing" a software, because each person could easily use it independently on his or her own computer, and according to the company's regulations he or she is supposed to buy the software package for that purpose. Then the pirate will respond with some legal holes indicating that companies have no right to restrict how one uses or modifies the software that one purchased. The argument goes back and forth with no end, not different from a tennis match, or two equally adept debaters in law. 

 It's a good thing at least their icon is a ship

As to where the final stand is, I'm sure everyone knows, that's why sites are closed and prosecuted (TV-links), sites are re-opened (The Pirate Bay - these guys must be seriously fearless or seriously stupid to name a site like this), sites go under different names twice a month (iDWANEO), and sites move their domains around and try to form a community of bomb-carrying kamikaze pirates who face prosecution at any time but is proud at what they're doing (apptrackr). It reminds me of the classic war movies, before rocket launchers and nuclear missiles; people would rush in to attack the castle with arrows, ladders, and rams, while the archers in the castle would shoot at the attackers. After all the attackers are dead the second wave would replace the first wave, repeating the exact same attack pattern. Pirates today are much like the infantry below the castle desperately trying to get inside. A soldier risks everything (his life) and gains nothing but a tiny bit of financial reward and lots of pride after a battle, so does a pirate who volunteers to crack code at the risk of being arrested. A pirate is proud of what s/he does, and in a pirate's own words, "making virtual commodities more accessible to everyone".

For all your iDevice needs, and much more convenient than iTunes

Accessibility, that's one of the main reasons why anyone would download a pirated copy of anything. If you didn't have to pay the $500 or so for Photoshop CS5, if you didn't have to pay the $150 or so for Windows 7, and if you didn't have to pay the $69.99 for the Starcraft 2 that you legally bought from EB Games (congratulations), or if you're really cheap, spend the $0.99 on an iDevice game, who in their right mind would spend hours searching for a working copy of a cracked software, then get a headache at trying to scan it for viruses, then spend even more time whenever an update comes out (most pirated software won't contain automatic updates)? I think the pricing behind these virtual commodities is really strategically planned out. They're priced in a way so that the companies actually take into consideration the amount of copies that will get pirated. We price it so high that it doesn't matter if you pirate it or not, we will always have a large group of genuine software loyalists who will buy it anyways at the high price (developers, businesses, etc). Better sell Photoshop for $500 apiece to a smaller target market, than $100 apiece to all the markets. This is great for the business, but bad for the consumers. Honestly (in my opinion), unless you seriously have tons of money to spend on a thing like software, I would really hesitate before spending $500 on Photoshop unless your job says that you need it. Editing that odd picture like once a day, or once a week, is not worth $500 in my opinion. Or take something much cheaper for an example. Sometimes I'd like to merge video files together, or trim them, or edit my music files. These kinds of functions, in today's programming standards, should be pieces of cake. But when I go on the web to see how I can do these, 99.99% of the search results leads me back to the same annoying page - $59.99 for a piece of software that can merge my .avi files together. That's just ridiculous, how many times a day am I going to merge .avi's together? Doing that once and you expect me to pay $59.99 for it? Even worse, most of these programs (won't name any names here) do not have a working demo. The thing they consider a demo will add a horrible watermark to your output, and trim the length of your output, making it completely unusable. The days of the 30-day evaluation period is nowhere to be seen. As you can see, this is the reason why I, along with many others, will look for a cracked version of these trivial software. It's a company people haven't heard of, charging an outrageous amount for a simple program, so most people will not feel that stab of guilty when downloading a leaked copy.

Ok so the "combined retail value of $80" is a bit far-fetched, but supporting indie developers who is trying to support charity sounds like a good cause... especially for a penny

On the other hand, I think there are serious issues concerning pirating really really inexpensive software. The prime example is the fab of iDevice applications. I'm not going to go to wiki and pull out some stat because no one will be interested in it, so I'm going to have a rough estimate and guess at least half of the apps in the entire appstore costs $0.99. This includes classic games such as Cut the Rope, Street Fighter IV (on sale for tsunami relief), and Helsing's Fire, to absolutely amazing apps such as Ocarina, Virtuoso Violin, and SketchPad. It is beyond me why people are willing to pay $50 for a PSP title, yet around half the iDevice population are unwilling to pay $0.99 for a game that is nearly (and sometimes better) as good, especially to developing indies whose income depends on their sales. One of the most extreme examples of "stealing" from indies is the case with the Humble Indie Bundle. It is a package of 5 simple games set to "open price", meaning buyers can pay any price they want, from a minimum of one penny to no maximum. You can't even buy a piece of paper for one penny, yet people are willing to spend the extra brain cells and electricity to pirate the games. This hints that it is no longer a mission to save money, but rather a more political role in that the pirates want to continuously enlarge their presence in the software community. Costs money? We hack it. Free? We still hack it. All of this just to let you know who we are.

It's true that pirates will generate traffic for the software that they pirate, and if the developer is lucky, might even make more sales due to the help from the pirates. But in most cases, all we see is indie developers who are left with a broken spirit and walk away from the scene due to lost sales. There's simply no point to continue developing if their work is simply going to be hacked within minutes of release. Sometimes I think that pirates should seriously be hired by the government, or at least Apple or something, with their superb computer skills. I can't even hack a piece of log in minutes, but they can sure hack a game in minutes.