It's a simple reality that it's easy to copy things nowadays. In the end, everything can be reduced to a number. Copying music, games, and everything else is hard to stop.

For the last few decades, publishers' attempt to stop piracy has been to attempt to make things more difficult for pirates. I listed some in my post above. There have been dozens of methods: CD keys. Code words to read in a manual. Special dongles to plug in while using the product. CDs that dissolve after a few days. MP3s that are hardcoded to your computer (making backing them up, or moving to a new computer, impossible), services where your computer must always be on, invisible background programs that secretly monitor your computer (don't laugh, Sony did it).

And all were ineffective against illegal copying, but all were extremely effective at making life difficult for people who legally bought the products.

The problem is that, due to the nature of piracy, pretty much the only people that anti-piracy measures work on are people who don't know how to pirate something.


So, that said, what can you do? Obviously content creators want to make money from their product, but the nature of that product means that it's impossible to prevent someone from copying it if they really want to.

SOPA won't help- as has been said, anyone with knowledge of DNS can get to a site that's been blacklisted. And there are plenty of piracy techniques that don't rely on getting a file from a centralized web site.

As I've said, the way to mitigate piracy is by making things cheaper and easy to access. Steam did it- it's revolutionized the PC gaming industry. Netflix did it- it's become such a powerhouse success story that people are sitting up and taking a sharp interest.

SOPA is just the latest example of increasingly drastic- and relatively useless- attempts by publishers to deal with piracy (see Sony's "let's install secret software" ploy). They're using a 1950s mindset to deal with a world where everything is information that can be broken down and copied- and that's why it's not successful.




(As a side note, I don't know how informed you are, but the whole piracy debate is one that has been long running, with a lot of interesting arguments. For one thing, it's extremely debatable as to how much piracy actually takes away from profits- for example, if someone who couldn't afford to buy a game pirates something, no income has been lost. Other factors include building customer loyalty through no DRM, and building groundswell support through word of mouth.

I don't necessarily support all those arguments- with the rise of Netflix and Steam (and securing a job), I pirate maybe 5% of what I do, compared to maybe 60% 5 years ago. But it's an interesting topic, and doesn't easily boil down to "MORE DRM TO FIGHT THE HACKERS!"