Essay: "The Solution to Piracy"

Like most people, sometimes I am a pirate.  One thing I don't pirate, however, is video games.  I tend to buy them through Steam.

Steam is an application that allows you to buy videogames and download them directly to your hard drive, rather than picking up a copy in the store.  Why would I do that, instead of just pirating them off the internet (which I have the technical know-how to do)?

Well, there are a few things. First of all, your Steam games are all "in the cloud."  If I'm using your computer, I can log onto my Steam account and play my games.  Second, Steam has a social networking service built-in that lets me see what games my friends own and are playing, and helps me find people to play with.  Third, and maybe most importantly, Steam offers crazy sales.  You'll turn on your computer and routinely see games marked down by 75%.  These sales are for "a limited time only" and you practically feel like you're losing money if you don't buy something.  In consequence, my hard drive is filled with games I haven't even had a chance to play yet.

Steam has some disadvantages, most notably that you need to be connected to the internet to play your games, but overall it's not only a good way to buy games, it's actually better than pirating them. Pirated games aren't in the cloud.  Pirated games don't show that your friends are playing them.  Steam, in other words, competes with piracy.

I think the conventional wisdom is that you can't compete with piracy: how can you do better than free, overpaid record executives moan?  But there's lots of disadvantages to piracy.  You have to go to weird websites with ads for Russian mail order brides that infect your computer with viruses.  You risk getting poor quality files, music that sounds tinny or blurry movies with Russian subtitles that were filmed on cellphones.  And most importantly, you have to break the law.

But look how these industries treat you.  Have you been to a movie recently?  First, they jacked up the price to like 14 bucks.  They gouge you on concessions.  They show 30 minutes of ads.  They don't sell you specific tickets, so for popular movies you risk having to sit in an absurd location, where you can't even see the screen.  And half the time the audience is full of dickheads, who talk or look on their cellphones and kick the back of your seat.  If you want to watch the movie in the comfort of your own home, you have to wait months before it comes out for rental.

Music is (or was) just as bad.  For a long time, iTunes set a limit on how often you could transfer your songs from one device to another.  In other words: if you paid for content, you were actually punished with an inferior product.  It simply blows my mind that anyone would be so shortsighted.  Not only that, but prices are generally fixed: no crazy sales, no weekly deals.  Pay us your ten bucks.  And they made it too difficult, at least at the beginning, to move your music around.

Apple got some things right (letting people buy a song a time is key) and they're now moving to the cloud, and I guess we'll see where things go in the future.

I think, for a long time, publishers, record companies and movie studios got used to competing solely on the quality of their content, and either forgot about (or tacitcly agreed to forget about) competing on price, the delivery of their services, and how they treat their artists.

If they want to stop piracy, they don't need fancy new legal tools or different legislation.  They just need to start thinking about how they treat their customers.  It's been so long since they've done so, I honestly think they've forgotten what it's like.  Perhaps piracy will finally force that to change.