Meet the Old Dread Pirate Roberts

Yarr! Me Hardies, Grab a Pint o' Grog an' Sit Down for a Tale of a Pirate's Legacy

I have been wanting to discuss intellectual property law here, but I'm trying to find a way to do it with the dudgeon level turned to something other than "eleven". It is not an easy thing for me. So I have decided I would start by focusing on how I interacted with IP in the past.

Once upon a time, I was a pirate. This was well before the term "pirate" entered common speech in reference to IP - back then a pirate was a guy like Edward Teach or Sir Francis Drake. People pictured the eye patch, the peg leg, the parrot. But I had none of these. I was eight years old, the year was 1982.

I had received my first computer from my parents that year. A brand new Commodore 64, I was pretty lucky, I almost ended up with a Coleco ADAM. I received it so I could improve my hand-eye coordination, my childhood testing showed my as having a problem in that area. I was also to learn how to touch type on it, because my handwriting was terrible. Of course, I quickly discovered the huge catalog of video games available for the C64. I loved Blue Max, Spy Hunter (the C64 version was arguably one of the better ports of this game), Lazy Jones (the most self-referential game ever), and Zork.

I purchased a lot of games. All the Infocom classics, a number of titles by Mastertronic, and quite a few others that I've forgotten. I also joined a user group, and that's where my tenure as a pirate began.

The C64 users group I joined was based around sharing software  piracy. It was a huge group. We met in a church once a month, brought our keyboards, 1541 disk drive and a portable television set and set them up on long tables. Then we'd walk the rows looking at what other people had made copies. Most of the users were around my age and had their parents with them, there was the occasional teenager or adult as well. One of the nice things about the group was that you could get games that were not available at any American retailer. Lazy Jones, for instance, was a product of the British software boom. The American gaming market had just collapsed. No American retailer stocked it, not my local computer shop, not Service Merchandise, or Kmart. But I got a copy at the group. My Dad, my cousin and I would also occasionally get games through friends. One of my friends had a cousin who was part of a pirating group - I forget which one, but I remember his particular moniker. He was Weird Beard the Pirate. It should be noted that Weird Beard wasn't old enough to grow a beard. I think he was about ten years old at this point.

I eventually moved up to MS-DOS around my fourteenth birthday, my first IBM PC was an Amstraad. My Dad got it as a credit card perk from AMEX - but it didn't turn out to be a very good perk. Similar to the Coleco ADAM, it was a complete system. That is, it came with a printer, and the monitor, disk drives and computer were a single unit. It shipped with MS-DOS 3.2, and was not very compatible with most software available for DOS at that time. I think I returned at least one fourth of the software that I purchased, not because I was pirating (retailers were becoming better informed about piracy at this point), but because it would not work on the Amstraad. To give you an impression of how bad this machine was, Sears - one of the few American retailers that stocked it, originally advertised it as a computer. Within two weeks of advertising it they began advertising it as a word processor and cut the price by something like fifty-percent. At this point I was buying more software because copying was getting more difficult. Rights management systems included things like needing to type in a certain word from a page of the manual, or the use of a code wheel to play the game. Additionally some software had code in the program itself to make casual copying difficult.

At first glance, this looks a lot like current rights enforcement systems and that it is working. I have bad news for you if you believe this. Every single technique was defeated rather quickly and those methods filtered down from professional pirates (IE those who sell illegal copies of these programs - this is particularly prevalent in Asia and Eastern Europe today) to hobbyists like me. Yes, at this point I definitely sussed that IP piracy was "wrong."

License keys came next, when you installed a program to your hard disk, you were asked to enter in a long sequence of letters and numbers. If you fail to do it correctly, the program tells you that you're wrong and waits for you to do it properly. There were always rumors that failing to do it correctly would do horrible things to your computer. I've heard people even claim that an incorrect entry could cause your computer to explode. I wish I was kidding. These failed because those codes are generated based on an algorithm. Once someone figures out the algorithm, they can generate "valid" keys all day long. This system combined frequently with a part of the package that "phones home" to the producer's server is mostly where we are today. Ask anybody in the industry, piracy is still rampant despite the use of the "phone home" defense.

I used Napster occasionally when it first released. Napster was great because I found music that I'd never encountered before. I recall one song that was a musical interpretation of a Robert Anton Wilson novel - and it included the author in the production. But this is the point where I gave up my life of piracy and went legit. All of those songs are gone, they died with my old P4 single core.

So why did I give up a life under the good auspices of the Jolly Roger? That's a question media companies ought to be asking, but aren't.

Primarily I gave up piracy for security. Not security against being sued, but computer security. File sharing sites are rife with viruses and malware. I was never infected but the thought was always worrisome. A single song, even priced at CD pricing could cost me a lot of time reinstalling Windows.

Convenience was another factor. Using a p2p like Napster was pretty easy, but it was often difficult to find what you were looking for - of course finding things you did not intend to was often very rewarding. Also assuming you found something you wanted the download took a long time to complete - even if you had a good connection (I was on dial up back then), it didn't mean the other guy did. Frequently the other party would get disconnected in the middle of a transaction, so you might spend an hour downloading and not get the song.

Cost was also a factor. iTunes was less expensive and had a better selection than my local record store. The price was still reasonable, and you didn't have to get a whole CD just to get the one or two songs you actually cared about.

Notice a trend in my reasons? Its all about me. Here's something from the software companies that failed to convince me:



Yeah, I'm really sorry about that. That is horrible. If I were still a pirate, I'd get a billion lashes under the Articles.