A report out of the European Unions just that the trend of video game piracy may actually be a net positive for the industry. I'm Jonathan Strickland, and this is Tech Stuff Daily. In general, it's pretty easy to understand that taking something that doesn't belong to you without the permission of the rightful owner is wrong. That seems clear, But when it comes to pirating video games, plenty of people seem to find endless justifications for doing just that.
They range from the technical, with arguments like it's just a copy of some digital code, so it's not like they don't still have the game that they can sell to other people, all the way to the economical arguments with something like this is a fifteen dollar game and they're selling it for sixty bucks. There's no way I'm
gonna pay that. I'm just gonna take it. And then there are tons of other arguments, and whether you find them justifiable or not, it's safe to say that the video game industry in general is firmly in the piracy is bad camp. Video game developers and publishers have worked hard to fight against piracy. On the technical side, they
have incorporated various strategies to copy protect games. It's called digital rights management, or DRM, but it tends to boil down to some sort of technology based approach to making sure the game the person launches is in fact a legitimate copy. Now, in the old days of classic games, you might encounter a title that requires you to consult the game manual and type out a certain word on a certain page to prove that you bought the game.
Later on, games included digital keys that required players to activate their copies by authenticating the game through some centralized security system. These days, many games require players to have a persistent online connection to verify they are playing a legitimate copy of the game, even if it is a single player experience. On the legal side, video game companies have hitched their wagons to the efforts from other forms
of media to protect intellectual property. In the United States, video game developers rely on copyright laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or d m c A to provide protections from transgressions against their intellectual property. These companies fight so fiercely in part because technology makes it pretty easy to duplicate and distribute software on a large scale. Peer to peer networks and broadband internet speeds take much of the time and effort out of transmitting large data
files across systems. There's a virtual army of hackers who make it their mission to crack these protection systems that are connected to games. Sometimes that makes the game easier to play without an Internet connection and unfortunate incentive for anyone who wants to avoid the hassle of always staying connected to the Internet just to play a game on a local machine. If we take a simple view of the problem, it seems clear that piracy hurts video game
companies bottom lines. After all, those pirated copies represent laws sales, right, According to multiple studies, that's not necessarily the case. It's a complicated issue. In two ten, the United States Government Accountability Office published a report titled Observations on Efforts to
quantify the economic effects of counterfeit and pirated Goods. The report explained that estimating the losses from pirated goods is practically impossible, as it requires making assumptions that could be wrong. For example, let's say a video game company has a big title coming out that gamers have been anticipating for a while. Some hacker has managed to infiltrate the game company and made copies of the game's source code, then uploaded that code to a piracy site. About a hundred
thousand people have downloaded the illegal copy. That means the video game company suffers a one hundred thousand copy shortfall right well, not necessarily, As the report pointed out, it's impossible to know how many of those one hundred thousand people would have purchased a legitimate copy had there been no piracy. It's possible none of them would have, which means the video game company would have suffered no loss sales. It's also possible that some people who downloaded the illegal
copy later purchased a legitimate one. Ultimately, the report said that the arguments these companies present when they lobby for tougher legislation against piracy are based off of figures with no foundation. In reality, it's not that the companies don't have a valid complaint, but rather that the losses they claim, which are often used when prosecuting hackers as a way to convince judges to hit those hackers with hefty fines and sentences, aren't necessarily realistic, and that brings us to
this new report from the EU. That one is a three hundred six page long document titled Estimating Displacement Rates of Copyrighted Content in the EU. Like the g a O report, this one didn't find a correlation between piracy and losses. In fact, the report suggests the opposite might be true. According to the report, quote illegal consumption leads to increased legal consumption end quote of games, so a rise in piracy seems to bring a rise in sales
along with it. The report suggests that the industry is getting better at converting people from someone who will download an illegal copy of a game into a legal customer. However, this report relied heavily upon surveys, meaning the researchers were asking people to self report on their gaming habits and behaviors. Critics point out that this does not always generate the most reliable data. Without means of authenticating the results, It's likely many in the video game industry will eye this
report with skepticism. Does this mean you should rush out and download all the games you want from piracy sites? Well not at all. For one thing, many of those games can be host to terrible malware that will infect your machine in nasty ways. For another, the whole point of the report was that people were converting over into legal customers. You could save yourself a step and just go the legal route. My personal philosophy is if a
game seems too expensive, I won't buy it. I'll wait for it to go on sale, or I'll just skip it entirely. If I think a particular company's approach to d r M is bad, I won't buy that company's products. If enough people do that, it sends a powerful message to the company, which is sure to re examine its approach to protecting its own intellectual property. Ultimately, we have to accept that just because something exists doesn't mean we
have a right to it. Hopefully video game companies will also ease off on their policies to protect their intellectual property. It's fine for a company to try and make certain it's not pirated out of business, but some of the lawsuits against people who have been found guilty of piracy include absolutely draconian requests for punishment. No one looks good coming out of that situation. To learn more about intellectual property, digital rights management, or something fun like video games, be
sure to subscribe to text On. In that podcast, I explore topics like these in much greater detail. That's all for me for now. See you next time. Wonder