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I used to be involved in piracy as much as the next person. I’m just as ordinary as them as well, and I like playing video games in my spare time too. And also similar to everybody else of my age, buying every great game or sequel which came my way is nothing short of a fantasy. Don’t go kidding yourself that teenagers get everything they fancy in this modern world, because it just isn’t true. A paper round only serves to fuel cinema trips and bus rides, and my parents certainly don’t carry around wads of cash in their pockets. I can only predict with certainty that games would appear at Christmas or on birthdays, or perhaps if a relative visits who likes to splash cash. Other than that, the ability to buy games at my leisure doesn’t happen, contrary to what many people are led to believe. Like all stereotypes, the truth is a very different matter.
As I said, I used to be involved in piracy. I first got involved when my friend visited my house one day, bringing along his PlayStation and twenty new games. His uncle had just bought a new computer complete with a CD writer, which was a rare thing for the time, and his cousin had stumbled upon the profitable business of copying PlayStation games. In the day, security measures weren’t needed because the copying of games wasn’t very widespread, mainly restricted to the far east where lucky tourists could pick up masses of software for petty prices. I was incredibly jealous of my friend who’d gotten more games in a day than I’d gotten in the couple of years since I’d bought my PlayStation, so I took the initiative and asked if his cousin could chip my PlayStation. From then on, I never bought an original game unless it was something I really wanted on release, such as Final Fantasy 7. If I did want a new game, I’d just phone up my mate and within a few days he’d bring the copied game to school for me.
That was probably the first time I’d seen copied games circulated around school. Within a few weeks of the news of chipped PlayStations, most people in our friend group had gotten theirs chipped, and publishers were never to see a penny from their wallets again. If you compare those times to what it is like now, you’d be quite amazed. Because nowadays it isn’t just my friend group who deal with copied games, but almost everybody who plays video games in the school. If I had to sum up the reason in one word, it would be cost. Video games are obviously focused at the younger end of the age spectrum and consequently not everybody can afford them. £40 is a ludicrous amount to pay for a game, especially for somebody who gets less than £5 a week and usually just buys sweets and a cinema ticket with it. If we’re supposed to pay full price for games yet still hold a constant interest in them, prices have to change.
Understandably then, piracy is rife within our age group. CD writers are commonplace in most PCs, and it doesn’t take an hour to burn a game anymore, just ten minutes and you’ve got a product which is potentially stealing £30 off a developer somewhere. It is that supposed ‘fact’ which I find very funny and misleading about the whole piracy issue. Publishers think they’re losing money out of our pirating shenanigans because we’re ‘stealing’ the developers’ intellectual property. But whether we’re copying games or not, we still can’t afford to buy them full price, and in either circumstance we wouldn’t pay anything for the game. The supposed billions of pounds lost due to piracy every year are billions of pounds which don’t exist in the first place. We can’t be expected to pay for things we can’t afford, which is why piracy is as commonplace as it is.
In fact, piracy in schools could be associated to drug dealers, not because they’re heavily involved in drugs, but because of the way games are distributed. There will be a ringleader within a group of people, somebody who does all the copying and charges two quid a game. Often they’ll give you ‘deals’ where if you buy a couple of games they’ll knock of a couple of quid. That’s the way it works, and many people are involved. With the introduction of external chips, people don’t have to suffer the risk of messing up their PlayStation by actually chipping it, and so Gamesharks are very popular. People don’t borrow games to try before they buy, but to simply copy them.
Piracy is a very large factor in schools, because it actually affects the choice of console people buy. While trying to explain the merits of buying a GameCube over a PS2, a person I was talking to today thought that it was stupid for Nintendo to opt for 8cm discs rather than DVDs, because he wanted to copy games. The fact that developers are trying to make money isn’t a concern to people anymore, and I doubt that he’d have cared if the company he was essentially ‘stealing’ from had gone broke. He didn’t care that Sega had gone out of business, despite the fact that he’d had about 50 copied Dreamcast games. He was also asking about whether you can get Xbox’s chipped, and when I told him about all the emulators and roms available to download simply via file sharing programs, he decided not to buy a console at all.
With the Xbox and GameCube being so recently released, piracy has reached a considerably low point. DVD burners aren’t commonplace, so developers don’t put piracy measures on their games. It is just the same circle of events happening again, the same with what happened to the PlayStation. As soon as you’re able to play copied games on the Xbox and GameCube, piracy will become big again and developers will be ‘losing’ billions more pounds. Software preventative measures can be easily broken, so it has to happen with the hardware. The GameCube has implemented a security feature against piracy, and piracy was the main reason why the N64 was cartridge based. I can tell you one thing, nobody was copying N64 games.
Piracy isn’t just limited to games though, it happens with music and DVDs as well. In fact, more CDs are copied than are actually bought. It is so easy to simply put a game or music CD into the drive, make an image then burn it to another CD, I start to wonder why nobody does anything about it. I read about all the legalitys and harsh punishments for offenders of copyright laws, yet I’ve never had any kind of run in with people investigating this. Its as if nobody even cares that games and music is being copied. If these companies want their supposed billions of pounds that they’re losing, why don’t they act against the offenders. Until there is some kind of preventative measure put in place against piracy, it will continue to flourish in schools and hamper the industry even further. I don’t condone piracy, but I think that the people who are letting pirates get away with it are just as guilty as the pirates themselves.
As I said, I used to be involved in piracy. I first got involved when my friend visited my house one day, bringing along his PlayStation and twenty new games. His uncle had just bought a new computer complete with a CD writer, which was a rare thing for the time, and his cousin had stumbled upon the profitable business of copying PlayStation games. In the day, security measures weren’t needed because the copying of games wasn’t very widespread, mainly restricted to the far east where lucky tourists could pick up masses of software for petty prices. I was incredibly jealous of my friend who’d gotten more games in a day than I’d gotten in the couple of years since I’d bought my PlayStation, so I took the initiative and asked if his cousin could chip my PlayStation. From then on, I never bought an original game unless it was something I really wanted on release, such as Final Fantasy 7. If I did want a new game, I’d just phone up my mate and within a few days he’d bring the copied game to school for me.
That was probably the first time I’d seen copied games circulated around school. Within a few weeks of the news of chipped PlayStations, most people in our friend group had gotten theirs chipped, and publishers were never to see a penny from their wallets again. If you compare those times to what it is like now, you’d be quite amazed. Because nowadays it isn’t just my friend group who deal with copied games, but almost everybody who plays video games in the school. If I had to sum up the reason in one word, it would be cost. Video games are obviously focused at the younger end of the age spectrum and consequently not everybody can afford them. £40 is a ludicrous amount to pay for a game, especially for somebody who gets less than £5 a week and usually just buys sweets and a cinema ticket with it. If we’re supposed to pay full price for games yet still hold a constant interest in them, prices have to change.
Understandably then, piracy is rife within our age group. CD writers are commonplace in most PCs, and it doesn’t take an hour to burn a game anymore, just ten minutes and you’ve got a product which is potentially stealing £30 off a developer somewhere. It is that supposed ‘fact’ which I find very funny and misleading about the whole piracy issue. Publishers think they’re losing money out of our pirating shenanigans because we’re ‘stealing’ the developers’ intellectual property. But whether we’re copying games or not, we still can’t afford to buy them full price, and in either circumstance we wouldn’t pay anything for the game. The supposed billions of pounds lost due to piracy every year are billions of pounds which don’t exist in the first place. We can’t be expected to pay for things we can’t afford, which is why piracy is as commonplace as it is.
In fact, piracy in schools could be associated to drug dealers, not because they’re heavily involved in drugs, but because of the way games are distributed. There will be a ringleader within a group of people, somebody who does all the copying and charges two quid a game. Often they’ll give you ‘deals’ where if you buy a couple of games they’ll knock of a couple of quid. That’s the way it works, and many people are involved. With the introduction of external chips, people don’t have to suffer the risk of messing up their PlayStation by actually chipping it, and so Gamesharks are very popular. People don’t borrow games to try before they buy, but to simply copy them.
Piracy is a very large factor in schools, because it actually affects the choice of console people buy. While trying to explain the merits of buying a GameCube over a PS2, a person I was talking to today thought that it was stupid for Nintendo to opt for 8cm discs rather than DVDs, because he wanted to copy games. The fact that developers are trying to make money isn’t a concern to people anymore, and I doubt that he’d have cared if the company he was essentially ‘stealing’ from had gone broke. He didn’t care that Sega had gone out of business, despite the fact that he’d had about 50 copied Dreamcast games. He was also asking about whether you can get Xbox’s chipped, and when I told him about all the emulators and roms available to download simply via file sharing programs, he decided not to buy a console at all.
With the Xbox and GameCube being so recently released, piracy has reached a considerably low point. DVD burners aren’t commonplace, so developers don’t put piracy measures on their games. It is just the same circle of events happening again, the same with what happened to the PlayStation. As soon as you’re able to play copied games on the Xbox and GameCube, piracy will become big again and developers will be ‘losing’ billions more pounds. Software preventative measures can be easily broken, so it has to happen with the hardware. The GameCube has implemented a security feature against piracy, and piracy was the main reason why the N64 was cartridge based. I can tell you one thing, nobody was copying N64 games.
Piracy isn’t just limited to games though, it happens with music and DVDs as well. In fact, more CDs are copied than are actually bought. It is so easy to simply put a game or music CD into the drive, make an image then burn it to another CD, I start to wonder why nobody does anything about it. I read about all the legalitys and harsh punishments for offenders of copyright laws, yet I’ve never had any kind of run in with people investigating this. Its as if nobody even cares that games and music is being copied. If these companies want their supposed billions of pounds that they’re losing, why don’t they act against the offenders. Until there is some kind of preventative measure put in place against piracy, it will continue to flourish in schools and hamper the industry even further. I don’t condone piracy, but I think that the people who are letting pirates get away with it are just as guilty as the pirates themselves.
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I used to be involved in piracy as much as the next person. I’m just as ordinary as them as well, and I like playing video games in my spare time too. And also similar to everybody else of my age, buying every great game or sequel which came my way is nothing short of a fantasy. Don’t go kidding yourself that teenagers get everything they fancy in this modern world, because it just isn’t true. A paper round only serves to fuel cinema trips and bus rides, and my parents certainly don’t carry around wads of cash in their pockets. I can only predict with certainty that games would appear at Christmas or on birthdays, or perhaps if a relative visits who likes to splash cash. Other than that, the ability to buy games at my leisure doesn’t happen, contrary to what many people are led to believe. Like all stereotypes, the truth is a very different matter.
As I said, I used to be involved in piracy. I first got involved when my friend visited my house one day, bringing along his PlayStation and twenty new games. His uncle had just bought a new computer complete with a CD writer, which was a rare thing for the time, and his cousin had stumbled upon the profitable business of copying PlayStation games. In the day, security measures weren’t needed because the copying of games wasn’t very widespread, mainly restricted to the far east where lucky tourists could pick up masses of software for petty prices. I was incredibly jealous of my friend who’d gotten more games in a day than I’d gotten in the couple of years since I’d bought my PlayStation, so I took the initiative and asked if his cousin could chip my PlayStation. From then on, I never bought an original game unless it was something I really wanted on release, such as Final Fantasy 7. If I did want a new game, I’d just phone up my mate and within a few days he’d bring the copied game to school for me.
That was probably the first time I’d seen copied games circulated around school. Within a few weeks of the news of chipped PlayStations, most people in our friend group had gotten theirs chipped, and publishers were never to see a penny from their wallets again. If you compare those times to what it is like now, you’d be quite amazed. Because nowadays it isn’t just my friend group who deal with copied games, but almost everybody who plays video games in the school. If I had to sum up the reason in one word, it would be cost. Video games are obviously focused at the younger end of the age spectrum and consequently not everybody can afford them. £40 is a ludicrous amount to pay for a game, especially for somebody who gets less than £5 a week and usually just buys sweets and a cinema ticket with it. If we’re supposed to pay full price for games yet still hold a constant interest in them, prices have to change.
Understandably then, piracy is rife within our age group. CD writers are commonplace in most PCs, and it doesn’t take an hour to burn a game anymore, just ten minutes and you’ve got a product which is potentially stealing £30 off a developer somewhere. It is that supposed ‘fact’ which I find very funny and misleading about the whole piracy issue. Publishers think they’re losing money out of our pirating shenanigans because we’re ‘stealing’ the developers’ intellectual property. But whether we’re copying games or not, we still can’t afford to buy them full price, and in either circumstance we wouldn’t pay anything for the game. The supposed billions of pounds lost due to piracy every year are billions of pounds which don’t exist in the first place. We can’t be expected to pay for things we can’t afford, which is why piracy is as commonplace as it is.
In fact, piracy in schools could be associated to drug dealers, not because they’re heavily involved in drugs, but because of the way games are distributed. There will be a ringleader within a group of people, somebody who does all the copying and charges two quid a game. Often they’ll give you ‘deals’ where if you buy a couple of games they’ll knock of a couple of quid. That’s the way it works, and many people are involved. With the introduction of external chips, people don’t have to suffer the risk of messing up their PlayStation by actually chipping it, and so Gamesharks are very popular. People don’t borrow games to try before they buy, but to simply copy them.
Piracy is a very large factor in schools, because it actually affects the choice of console people buy. While trying to explain the merits of buying a GameCube over a PS2, a person I was talking to today thought that it was stupid for Nintendo to opt for 8cm discs rather than DVDs, because he wanted to copy games. The fact that developers are trying to make money isn’t a concern to people anymore, and I doubt that he’d have cared if the company he was essentially ‘stealing’ from had gone broke. He didn’t care that Sega had gone out of business, despite the fact that he’d had about 50 copied Dreamcast games. He was also asking about whether you can get Xbox’s chipped, and when I told him about all the emulators and roms available to download simply via file sharing programs, he decided not to buy a console at all.
With the Xbox and GameCube being so recently released, piracy has reached a considerably low point. DVD burners aren’t commonplace, so developers don’t put piracy measures on their games. It is just the same circle of events happening again, the same with what happened to the PlayStation. As soon as you’re able to play copied games on the Xbox and GameCube, piracy will become big again and developers will be ‘losing’ billions more pounds. Software preventative measures can be easily broken, so it has to happen with the hardware. The GameCube has implemented a security feature against piracy, and piracy was the main reason why the N64 was cartridge based. I can tell you one thing, nobody was copying N64 games.
Piracy isn’t just limited to games though, it happens with music and DVDs as well. In fact, more CDs are copied than are actually bought. It is so easy to simply put a game or music CD into the drive, make an image then burn it to another CD, I start to wonder why nobody does anything about it. I read about all the legalitys and harsh punishments for offenders of copyright laws, yet I’ve never had any kind of run in with people investigating this. Its as if nobody even cares that games and music is being copied. If these companies want their supposed billions of pounds that they’re losing, why don’t they act against the offenders. Until there is some kind of preventative measure put in place against piracy, it will continue to flourish in schools and hamper the industry even further. I don’t condone piracy, but I think that the people who are letting pirates get away with it are just as guilty as the pirates themselves.
As I said, I used to be involved in piracy. I first got involved when my friend visited my house one day, bringing along his PlayStation and twenty new games. His uncle had just bought a new computer complete with a CD writer, which was a rare thing for the time, and his cousin had stumbled upon the profitable business of copying PlayStation games. In the day, security measures weren’t needed because the copying of games wasn’t very widespread, mainly restricted to the far east where lucky tourists could pick up masses of software for petty prices. I was incredibly jealous of my friend who’d gotten more games in a day than I’d gotten in the couple of years since I’d bought my PlayStation, so I took the initiative and asked if his cousin could chip my PlayStation. From then on, I never bought an original game unless it was something I really wanted on release, such as Final Fantasy 7. If I did want a new game, I’d just phone up my mate and within a few days he’d bring the copied game to school for me.
That was probably the first time I’d seen copied games circulated around school. Within a few weeks of the news of chipped PlayStations, most people in our friend group had gotten theirs chipped, and publishers were never to see a penny from their wallets again. If you compare those times to what it is like now, you’d be quite amazed. Because nowadays it isn’t just my friend group who deal with copied games, but almost everybody who plays video games in the school. If I had to sum up the reason in one word, it would be cost. Video games are obviously focused at the younger end of the age spectrum and consequently not everybody can afford them. £40 is a ludicrous amount to pay for a game, especially for somebody who gets less than £5 a week and usually just buys sweets and a cinema ticket with it. If we’re supposed to pay full price for games yet still hold a constant interest in them, prices have to change.
Understandably then, piracy is rife within our age group. CD writers are commonplace in most PCs, and it doesn’t take an hour to burn a game anymore, just ten minutes and you’ve got a product which is potentially stealing £30 off a developer somewhere. It is that supposed ‘fact’ which I find very funny and misleading about the whole piracy issue. Publishers think they’re losing money out of our pirating shenanigans because we’re ‘stealing’ the developers’ intellectual property. But whether we’re copying games or not, we still can’t afford to buy them full price, and in either circumstance we wouldn’t pay anything for the game. The supposed billions of pounds lost due to piracy every year are billions of pounds which don’t exist in the first place. We can’t be expected to pay for things we can’t afford, which is why piracy is as commonplace as it is.
In fact, piracy in schools could be associated to drug dealers, not because they’re heavily involved in drugs, but because of the way games are distributed. There will be a ringleader within a group of people, somebody who does all the copying and charges two quid a game. Often they’ll give you ‘deals’ where if you buy a couple of games they’ll knock of a couple of quid. That’s the way it works, and many people are involved. With the introduction of external chips, people don’t have to suffer the risk of messing up their PlayStation by actually chipping it, and so Gamesharks are very popular. People don’t borrow games to try before they buy, but to simply copy them.
Piracy is a very large factor in schools, because it actually affects the choice of console people buy. While trying to explain the merits of buying a GameCube over a PS2, a person I was talking to today thought that it was stupid for Nintendo to opt for 8cm discs rather than DVDs, because he wanted to copy games. The fact that developers are trying to make money isn’t a concern to people anymore, and I doubt that he’d have cared if the company he was essentially ‘stealing’ from had gone broke. He didn’t care that Sega had gone out of business, despite the fact that he’d had about 50 copied Dreamcast games. He was also asking about whether you can get Xbox’s chipped, and when I told him about all the emulators and roms available to download simply via file sharing programs, he decided not to buy a console at all.
With the Xbox and GameCube being so recently released, piracy has reached a considerably low point. DVD burners aren’t commonplace, so developers don’t put piracy measures on their games. It is just the same circle of events happening again, the same with what happened to the PlayStation. As soon as you’re able to play copied games on the Xbox and GameCube, piracy will become big again and developers will be ‘losing’ billions more pounds. Software preventative measures can be easily broken, so it has to happen with the hardware. The GameCube has implemented a security feature against piracy, and piracy was the main reason why the N64 was cartridge based. I can tell you one thing, nobody was copying N64 games.
Piracy isn’t just limited to games though, it happens with music and DVDs as well. In fact, more CDs are copied than are actually bought. It is so easy to simply put a game or music CD into the drive, make an image then burn it to another CD, I start to wonder why nobody does anything about it. I read about all the legalitys and harsh punishments for offenders of copyright laws, yet I’ve never had any kind of run in with people investigating this. Its as if nobody even cares that games and music is being copied. If these companies want their supposed billions of pounds that they’re losing, why don’t they act against the offenders. Until there is some kind of preventative measure put in place against piracy, it will continue to flourish in schools and hamper the industry even further. I don’t condone piracy, but I think that the people who are letting pirates get away with it are just as guilty as the pirates themselves.