The Complication With Piracy

The media has for several years now been pushing for a crackdown on online pirating.  After the Patriot Act and its violations of our privacy, legislation in the government meant to extend the governments control over what the American public can do over the internet are being opposed with a ferocity rarely seen by lawmakers. In addition to public protests of the recent bill SOPA(Stop Online Piracy Act), many companies like Google and Wikipedia staged blackouts, forums, and blogs attacking its legitimacy. Law enforcement knows that many people pirate but they are unable to do much when most of the population that actively uses the internet vehemently oppose restrictions and value privacy in their internet dealings.  The internet is very much against any restrictions or breach of privacy from the government and it has always been a sort of sanctuary for people who want to say something anonymously, or view something that the average person might judge them for.  Internet users see this as a breach of privacy like in the court case Mapp vs Ohio in 1961.(http://www.infoplease.com/us/supreme-court/cases/ar19.html)

Also the "problem" with piracy is that no one can really say how harmful it is to the various industries relevant to it.  Statistics show that pirates, in general, buy over 30% more then people that dont pirate. (http://www.techhive.com/article/2012121/pirates-buy-more-music-than-legal-downloaders-study-shows.html) So realistically pirates only take away from the potential revenue of the media they pirate.  Because of this statistic, the question then becomes: if these pirates were incapable of pirating, would they buy the products they pirate?  In my personal experience I would say no.

I am a pirate, not a very active pirate, but a pirate nonetheless.  I tend to pirate video games if I pirate at all.  Due to the lack of good PC demos, many gamers will pirate a game to test it out to see if it is worth our time.  If its not then usually we ignore or delete it from our hard-drive.  My most recent experience like this was with the game Endless Space, which i found too boring for my taste.  Most pirating gamers, however, will buy games that they decide is worth their time and money.  My most noteworthy experience with this was with the Indie game Mount and Blade.  I have probably spent at least a hundred hours on that game.  It is also apparent that Indie games in general are made popular by the people that pirate them.  This is how games like Minecraft became popular.  People found that it was a game worth buying and the creator is now extremely wealthy and already working on a new game.  This proves that pirating at the very least contributes to new creative material in gaming.