Geographical boundaries on the internet just encourage piracy

The biggest thing I can think of that actually encourages piracy is the locking of content due to your location in the world.  Netflix does it, Hulu, Amazon ... the list goes on.  Many services that people across the world will happily give up money for are locked to American users.

This is partly because of the whole has to be censored for your area of the world type deal.  Every country has different censorship laws.  So every item of media has to be censored to that country before release.

But what if, this is a novel idea here, we did this crazy thing of letting people decide for themselves what is appropriate to watch.  I can understand censorship in wanting to censor things like kiddie porn, seriously only sick people look up that stuff and frankly if your caught doing it you should be turned over to the community you reside in for punishment (I'm sure that community can come up with some very creative ways to punish someone who would even think of doing that to their children).

But lets be honest here.  Legal pornography (you know the type between two consenting of age adults) isn't exactly hard to find.  There is endless websites now dedicated to the amateur porn stars of the world.  Most of them free.  And there is a very long line of people wanting their two minutes of porn fame.  This fact is actually killing the porn industry but that's something for another day and probably not a rant I will do.

But my point is I have seen a penis in a video tape.  I have seen a boob.  I have seen a vagina.  These are not new sights.  I'm married.  I've seen my husband's.  Hell I've had to look at my own bits in the mirror my whole life.  I've seen pornography.  So none of this is new.

As for violence ... well most movies now days take the cake.  There is very few movies that can make my stomach churn now days.  I would have to say the saw series is about my limit.  Most people would say I'm a pussy for admitting that, but hell have you actually watched the brutality in those movies?  Not my cup of tea but you know its someone else's.  The human centipede comes to mind as another movie that I don't really care for.  I think South Park did a much better job anyway with that movie.

Then again movie studios are putting out dribble like Twilight.  That's probably worse that the two examples above.  Bout the only movies that make me want to puke.  Yet those pieces of trash which destroy the whole movie making industry by being mass produced money making machines rather than true art (or failing true art something that doesn't kill brain cells for an hour and a half).  So I don't know which is more scary ... the destruction of ever known piece of vampire mythology by a woman who cared more about her bank account or a line of surgically grafted together humans giving permanent ass to mouth.

So the real point I'm working towards here is that censorship laws are a bit out dated when you consider what they are really for.  Limiting the amount of filth on your TV screen.  Its not hard to legitimately find alternative sources of some of the most horrific or sexual ideas around.  Movie studios have been pumping these out for years.  All censorship laws are doing is preventing access to services that the world is crying out for.

So if I want to go on to Netflix and pay and be a good little bunny and give up my money to view media content, if I'm outside America I have to trust these dodgy VPN networks to mask my physical location.  Not all VPNs are dodgy, but lets face it you are routing every piece of your internet usage via a third unknown party that doesn't really have to adhere to legalities like large corporations do.  You have to select probably a bit of a fringe VPN because ones supplied by large corporations would quickly pick up on you being dodgy and ban you or send around the FBI to cart you of to Guantanamo Bay.

Strictly speaking using a VPN to access Netflix for instance from another country is a legal grey area.  Companies like Netflix will say that its against their policies but in all honesty if they catch someone doing it what are they going to do?  If I was them, I was give them a warning and then forget about them.  Why do I really care where in the world someone is as long as I'm getting my fees?  They are paying for it, the only issue is they aren't in the right part of the world.  And is that really enough to turn away a paying customer?

And movie studios ... what are they going to do?  Come down hard on someone who is actually paying for their content?  They weren't popular when they were suing kids for copyright infringement or old ladies for downloading porn (old ladies who had trouble switching on the computer in the first place let alone finding a torrent site) so how popular do you think they will be if they sued someone who was paying for their content?

At the end of the day, services like Netflix and Hulu and so on are the way of the future.  And I still think we should consider this - let the people choose what is appropriate for them to view.  And until these services are equal everywhere, piracy will exist because placing a boundary only means that users have to find another way around it.

Then again I worked for a retailer who sold video games.  The number of parents that abused us for not selling R18 rated games to them for their 5 year old child was unbelievable.  So maybe the human race is not quite ready to be responsible and decide for themselves ...

A case for piracy in games being bad

What happens when pirates play a game development simulator and then go bankrupt because of piracy?

So I came by this little article in my travels.  It made me smile.  This fits right in with an earlier post about creative ways that game development companies have come up with to screw over pirates.  Of course this is a sort of in your face this is what you are doing to us.  A bit of what goes around comes around.

We will all admit that piracy has now become so common place that if a person doesn't pirate stuff then they at least know someone who does and where to get it.  I recall one company I worked for where on night shift it unusual for there not to be a large hard drive of pirated content being passed around.  And by large we are talking in excess of 100 gig.  Everyone else brought in their own large hard drive and the work computers soon became content copying machines.  No one even thought about it.  Occasionally there was the odd joke about the sheer amount of piracy that went on in the company but no one even blinked.  Even management was in on the act, they would actively look for people with the best content.

There was no need to download it yourself in this situation, the chances are someone else had done so already and was willing to share.  What better way to earn brownie points with management than to be the source of their favorite TV shows, movies, music and so on.

I believe now days you would be hard pressed to find any person who hasn't pirated at least one item in their life time.  Copying a CD for instance.  The grandparents who didn't know any better when their grand kids put something on their computer.  The kids who pass around copies of their fave songs.  Its everywhere.

What this article attempts to highlight is that given the chance people would rather steal something that pay for it.  Fair enough, given half the chance we would rather keep our few dollars in our pockets and get it for free.  And who wouldn't rather get something for free.  A lot of people have to work an hour to pay $8 USD  for the game mentioned in the article.  A lot of people in the US however would probably have to work a couple hours to make that money.  When you think like that then you realize why people would be reluctant to shell out for a game that's only a couple dollars in value.

The game industry however is like a lot of media industries.  Every country has its own rules.  So what flies in America might not in Britain for instance.  So if you want to view this release in its original format (The latest iteration of the Mortal Kombat series comes to mind here) you don't have much choice but to pirate if you live in a country that has a stricter system in place for media.  For instance a number of games that were popular (Grand Theft Auto 4, Mortal Kombat) but initially banned in Australia until they were censored because of their graphic content were available through places like eBay or other online stores based in other countries.  If you ordered from one of these locations then you could get thrown in jail in Australia for importing explicit banned content.  However if you illegally download it then the chances they will catch you out are slim to none.

These are a couple of the motivating factors for piracy.  There are many more.  Being cheap right up there.  But if you consider the second motivation, the one where the pirate doesn't want a censored version, then there will always be a market for pirated media because lets face it, not everyone wants the sanitized church version and they would like to be able to make up their own minds about things.  Its the ones who don't actually play the games but blab on about kids getting access to this stuff that sanitize things.  See a previous post here for a rant on that one.

However I do have sympathy for the indie developer.  Games, unlike other media content, don't really have any other streams of income other than charging players for a copy.  Music has their tours, movies have movie theaters  TV shows have their adverts.  Games don't really have a lot else.  In fact a lot of software doesn't.  Unless they go the path of the whole social pay per play route.  Then I just walk away from the game.  If I'm gonna give my hard earned money for a game at least make it something worth my time and not the time wasters that games like Farmville are.  Farmville is just to fill in the void that exists between the cradle and grave and I frankly have better things to do with my time.  (I was unemployed once and sunk a great deal of time into this game and have now seen the light.  Luckily I was too broke to sink any money into it)

So in the case of games I would actually be on the side of the developer.  Especially an indie developer.  Indie game houses are the ones that give us the best and freshest ideas.  They don't have the stock standard formulas in place, the can experiment and play and give us a game that is worthy of our time.  They deserve our support and our $8.  They are the ones that will save us from the void of pay per play Farmville like games and save our Facebook news feeds from endless spam about how such and such got a new cow for their farm.

In the case of a game with DRM ... that is just crying out to be hacked to teach anyone with online DRM not to mess with their player base.