Are Anti-Piracy Methods Really Worth It?

                When one hears about piracy nowadays, it isn’t about Jack Sparrow or Captain Hook. Piracy is when a product is used or reproduced without authorization from its company. It is an issue that many companies face and wonder whether or not actions should be taken to prevent it. Also, one has to wonder how much it would affect companies that already have a high income of money from sales. I believe that though piracy is bad, there are other methods that can be taken in order to reduce unwanted piracy while increasing sales and monetary income.

How big of an issue is piracy?

                Using some stats from the Directors Guild of America site, it is shown that more people have pirated each episode from the TV series Heroes than have actually watched it on TV (6.6mil to 5.9 mil). Another statistic on the same site says that one million is the average number of times Russian movies are downloaded from the Internet during the first week in theaters. What can be taken from these values is that piracy is indeed a big issue. And if anyone is like me, he or she can remember when kids used to talk so much about torrenting - or downloading illegally - different videos and songs online. Now the numbers show how much piracy is an by the amount of people that are committing the action, but some other values include money that could have been used for other services. These values don’t have as much backing to them because the money doesn’t necessarily go in these areas. If people decided to use the money that they would’ve used to get videos rather than torrent them, it’s hard to say where it would’ve gone, if it was used at all. Another thing to point out is how much piracy actually affects some of the bigger companies. When we look at the music industry, many people earn billions of dollars from album sales and nowadays we get digital sales, but having some of their products get pirated might not actually harm them much. The torrentfreak website (most likely biased towards torrenting), decides to look at the different types of music format and how that’s affected sales, mainly with a decrease in physical copy sales where digital copies end up selling more. This is where man people blame piracy and attempt to say it is decreasing the physical copy sales, which is not the case. (Anything else to input?)

Does piracy help promote games?

                It seems like a weird question to ask, but in this case is very valid. As found about from a Kotaku blog, this game, Anodyne, was able to use piracy to their advantage. A Torrent for the game would be put on the site, as well as a donation button and links to pages like Steam Greenlight. This resulted in more sales overall, more money earned overall for the company that created Anodyne, meaning they earned more by promoting piracy than they did normally. It’s hard to say whether this process might always work and one of the main cases if it’s actually needed for some bigger companies that already earn enough. (Check if there is anything more concrete that can be added)

How well do anti-piracy measures work?

                Though for the most part it’s a lot of speculation to whether or not anti-piracy methods are cost effective or not, it’s shown that having anti-piracy methods compared to not having methods have an equal amount of pirating. Anti-piracy can work to some extent, but how much effort and how much it costs may not necessarily be worth it.What some video game companies have taken to is being able to code a program in their game to detect if the game was pirated and then to make the game substantially harder once it was detected. Even in the well-known game Earthbound by Nintendo made it so you can still play the game passed a warning screen, even though it was harder, and just before the end of the game, it would freeze, crash, and delete the save data that you had for that file. It should almost be up to the company to find a way to prevent piracy for their own product, rather than having the government worry about piracy.

                It’s agreeable that piracy is bad. It is hurtful to the company no matter the amount of money or product that is stolen, and if one wants a movie, game, or album to continue on, they should support their company rather than hurt it. In the end, it may just have to be up to the company itself whether or not they will include anti-piracy methods or not, or whether they need them. Where we will have to look now are different approaches to piracy, and the efficiency of said approaches.

Works Cited in progress...