Fighting Piracy: stop hitting the Burn key

The first thing we’ve got to do is to stop calling it piracy. Piracy sounds cool, piracy is Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom and Kiera Knightley. Piracy sounds sexy. So let’s just call it what it is – stealing.

Don’t get us wrong here because there are many reasons and many justifications, and a lot of them actually even make sense. But it’s really important that we recognise that piracy is theft.

When you buy a book, or a movie, or a video game, what do you really get? The actual, physical product, or the content, the data? If you buy a Halo disc, is it wrong to let your friend borrow it and play it on his own console? Of course not.

But for instance, you duplicate the disc yourself, so that you now have two copies of Halo, which both of you can use at the same time. It’s such a small step from sharing a disc to copying it after all – in both cases, your friend, who hasn’t paid the creators for the product, gets to play – but by doing this you’re a buccaneer, a pirate sailing the seas. You’re Cap’n Jack Sparrow, and you’ve just stolen!

We all favour cheaper music, movies and games. It feels a little unfair having to fork over 400 rupees to listen to a collection of jazz tracks, which are floating around on the internet anyway. But unless that money goes to the people who make the music, we’re not going to hear a lot of new music. Nor movies. Nor games.

Take away the jargon and what it boils down to is this: You copy. I don’t get money. I don’t make more music. You copy. Store owners don’t make money. They don’t sell more music. You copy.
You don’t get more music.

Let’s take a specific instance. It’s hard to say how many people have even heard of Beyond Good and Evil. It was practically the darling of the review circuit, and there was really a lot to recommend the game. But if you were to look it up online, then you can find it in the Wikipedia list of commercial failures in video gaming, right next to the N-Gage. So why did a game that seemed to have everything going for it, bomb more than George W Bush in Iraq?

Piracy is a favoured answer. Most gamers certainly played the game. But most of them didn’t buy it either, if we’re to listen to UbiSoft. According to them, the commercial sales of Beyond Good and Evil (on the PC, PS2 and XBox) were disappointing.

Equally interesting is how piracy makes things available. If you want to watch the latest Iranian movie, or perhaps a low key documentary, which will never reach distribution in India, it’s a little silly to have to import it all the way from Hong Kong or the States. Forget avant-garde cinema, even commercial low budget movies are hard to find in India. Movies, which don’t do well commercially will have the run of a week in halls and disappear completely after that.

So, in some ways Pallika Bazaar (Delhi) and others like it certainly do have a role to play. Yusuf, a shopkeeper there says, “If piracy is wrong then why do I have so many customers. I sell nearly a 100 discs every day.” And there’s a point in here. Many top line games release months later in India, or not at all. So, the only way to get the game is via piracy. Ironically enough, the reason that most games aren’t released in India is because there’s too much piracy here!

Another shopkeeper gives more insight into the business. “We sell consoles to anyone, mod them so that they run the pirated games, and we sell all the add-ons, extra wires and controllers. Around five or six XBox are modded every day.”

A third shopkeeper in Pallika Bazaar, Bunty, asks, “People see that a game is on sale for 3,000 rupees while here it’s between fifty to hundred bucks. Which one do you think that they will buy?” Movies, he says are available just for 30 bucks!

There are a few things actually, working against piracy. The internet is the key thing. As more and more games go online, piracy isn’t a working option. And India is seen as a huge market. Now, if someone would just fix the pricing, piracy might actually reduce. Until then, we’ll just keep reminding everyone that it is, indeed, theft.

Piracy Figures

Movies
FICCI estimate puts the Indian movie industry’s loss at Rs 1,200 crore in 2004 alone. The Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) confirmed that big Hollywood studios lost an estimated
$6.1 billion in the year 2006. Besides, Indian piracy has gone global with over 1.25 lakh pirated Indian movies doing the rounds in as far as Netherlands.

Music
India is known to be plagued with a 56% piracy rate, both in CD-R (recordable compact discs) and the mp3 segment. The annual loss to the music industry due to piracy is about Rs 650 crore. The size of the industry is also about Rs 600 crore. So, each year, we tend to lose an industry to piracy.

Games
The Electronic Software Association Anti-Piracy FAQ says that the total losses in 2006 due to video game piracy amount to $3.0 billion. India falls within the top ten, according to a report by the International Intellectual Property Alliance. Italy is the global leader in piracy at $817 million, then China at $589.9 million, followed by Spain at $510.5 million and South Korea at $461.9 million.