That's the attitude most people have. When you see the commercials at the cinema, or ads in the computer magazines about piracy, most people instantly think that it's yet another example of "the man" being oppressive. But what most people don't realize is that there are really 3 different types of piracy.
The first one is the typical kids in the schoolyard kind of piracy. Johnny downloads a game or some music of the net, thinks it's cool and makes copies for a few of his friends. The chances are that his friend's aren't savvy enough to download the stuff for themselves, let alone burn additional copies so the spiral of piracy there grows really quite slowly. The jury is out as to just how much this damages the industry, if at all. When I was a kid, I admit that I had pirated software, mainly games. I also had no money, and no means of getting any. Now though I own and use original licensed software only. So, the net result of that schoolyard piracy back in the 80s for me was that the industry got its hooks into someone who later spent a sizeable portion of their disposable income on software. When I hear about friend's kids copying software today I frown on it, but my view is that it's ultimately an investment in the future of the industry. At the very least if little Johnny loves getting pirated games from zap-pow-bang software, then when his birthday or Christmas money arrives, he's probably going to give it to zap-pow-bang software for their latest and greatest release. I know I did.
The second type of piracy is much worse. This is where the tight fisted businessman decides he doesn't want to spend his budget on software and buys just one copy of something and spreads it around his entire department, or even worse, the entire company. At the very start of my career I worked for a company that did just that. To be fair, it wasn't the company, it was the brusque, hygienically challenged head of the IT department. By that time I'd been involved in writing games software and was writing articles for magazines. I had a very good idea what piracy on that scale meant to the creators bank balance, and he and I had countless extremely loud arguments when I refused to install the software. I even considered reporting him, but at 18 years old I really didn't want to lose my first job. As it turns out I actually didn't need to. Towards the end of my tenure there laws were passed in the UK outlawing piracy and imposing stiff prison sentences on the people responsible. It took only a few unsubtle hints about jail terms before this guy changed his ways.
The third type is even worse, and Heather and I encountered it first hand today, for the first time ever. You hear stories about organized crime rings using pirated software, music, movies and counterfeit goods as a great way to fund their nefarious operations. To me it always evoked mental images from the film Traffic; nasty seedy people involved in drug and people trafficking, living their lives at the very edge of normal society. It always seemed so "Hollywood", so far removed from my family's normal everyday life. Heather needed to get some software (Adobe Illustrator) to help her out with some graphics and design work she is doing for a friend. Trying to save some cash she went shopping on EBay and found a used copy for 25 pounds. She bid, she won, and the software arrived this morning. Kinda.
What actually arrived was a plain brown envelope with a printed slip of paper telling her how to install, another printed slip of paper telling her all about the hundreds of other titles she can get for next to nothing, and two CD-Rs containing an illegal copy of Illustrator. Heather wanted the original. She wanted the manuals, and the packaging and the real and actual disks so that perhaps later she could upgrade, or at least rely on Adobe for technical support. She didn't want stolen goods. We did a little research on EBay and found that the guy she ordered from actually has a huge number of titles for sale on EBay, and more sinister yet also has a great line in counterfeit clothing going on. You send him a small fee, he sends you a list of all the knock off clothing titles he can get and then you buy in bulk and start selling them on EBay on his behalf. By his own admission you'll make a stack of money very quickly.
This is the worst and most sinister of the pirates out there - the organized criminal. Who knows where the money he makes goes, but at a guess I'd say drugs. As an author and a developer I was incensed. This guy represents the scum of the earth. He alone probably costs the industry a few hundred thousand, if not millions, in lost revenue each year. He alone is probably responsible for more than a handful of job losses over recent years. Given that he's probably linked to a full criminal organization though the figures are likely to be considerably higher than that.
In the UK we have two organizations you can deal with when you come across this stuff; FACT (Federation Against Copyright Theft) and FAST (Federation Against Software Theft). We contacted the latter. You'd think that a guy this organized would be hard to trace though wouldn't you. You'd imagine that after years of illegality he'd have become a master at covering his tracks. Wrong. This guy is so damn cocky that he sent the pirated software to Heather recorded delivery, which meant he had to record his house number and post code on the back of the envelope. A quick trip to www.streetmap.co.uk gave us his address and we were more than happy to pass it onto FAST. The people at FAST were very helpful indeed. They are going to contact Adobe to see if they want to prosecute themselves, or leave FAST to do it. That's important. There was no question in their mind that this guy is going to be raided and prosecuted, it's simply a case of who is going to lead the case. In this country prison sentences for this kind of thing run into multiple years per offence. That's per piece of pirated software. Now, thankfully, his activities are going to cease. The money he makes is not going to be available for drugs, or smuggling, or prostitution. Hundreds of other people are no longer going to be ripped of by him. Most importantly of all though, less jobs may be lost, less money diverted from the people that deserve it for all their hard work.
Pirates beware - not everyone out here will sit back quietly when you rip them off.
10:03:38 AM 
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