But, looking at recent years, it seems like the only way to combat piracy is to make "legal" downloading more convenient than piracy. It's basically a given at this point that you can't create a file secure enough that it can't be hacked. And anti-piracy measures often become counter-productive: special keys and codes you need to save, needing your computer be always connected to the internet, only allowing a buyer to re-download a few times before his purchase "expires," restricting the ways you can use what you've bought. These things don't exist on pirated versions, so it just makes people more willing to pirate.

Music: iTunes isn't perfect, but it's been a step in the right direction. iTunes allows you to get the music you want quickly, safely, and relatively cheaply. It needs some work on DRM- if I buy a song, I want to do whatever the hell I want with it- but it's a good step.

Games: If you don't play video games, you've probably never heard of Steam. Steam is a computer program that acts as a kind of a super-iTunes for video games- you have a staggering library to browse through, and things are often cheap or on sale.

Amazingly though, Steam has very little DRM. Your games are saved to your account, and you can install them and uninstall them as much as you want. You need to be online to buy and download the game, but once it's on your computer, that's all. Moreover, Steam is well-known for customer service and ease-of-use.

I used to pirate a TON of games back in the day. Various reasons, sometimes I couldn't afford it, sometimes I couldn't find it, sometimes I was lazy, etc. Steam fixes a lot of those problems. 90% of the games on Steam I probably could have gotten for free if I had tried really hard to pirate them, but that's the key- "try really hard." Do I really want to spend an entire day downloading various disc images and CD keys and patches? Or do I want to click 2 buttons and be done with it?

Movies/TV Again, this comes down to ease-of-use. People want to watch what they want, when they want. With Tivo, Netflix, and more importantly, the Internet, they can. I LOVE watching professional-grade episodes of shows on network web sites. Only problem? The networks are often terrible about archiving.

If I want to watch something from Season 2 of Archer, legally? Out of luck. Can't find it on the network's site. Netflix doesn't have it. The DVD isn't for sale.

But, oh look, I can go to any number of unauthorized streaming sites, and watch it. So again, "pirating" means I have to search through dozens of shady links of poor quality before finding what I want.


Maybe Joel or others will say, "it's not for sale, it's their IP, too bad." To them I say, you're living in a dream world. It's 2012. If it exists, you can get it online. The only demonstrated way to reduce piracy is to make it convenient to obtain something legally.


(Which, as I think has been mentioned in a previous post, is why SOPA is a failure on multiple levels- it wouldn't even stop piracy)



The "we must stamp out piracy at all costs!" mindset of the older studios, while understandable, isn't particularly productive. The way to deal with the problem is to figure out where the new markets are (the Internet) and how best to deal with them (by making thing as open and easy as possible).