We all know that piracy is a crime. No matter how you choose to morally wrap it up, it does ultimately boil down to theft. – And if you were to tell me that you’d never engaged in it at some point in your life, you’d have to forgive me if I took that with more than a little scepticism (and no, I’m not, incidentally, attempting to bail you in the comments section to reveal or deny your criminality).
There is, however, one thing I’m pretty sure we’ve all encountered at some point over the years and that’s anti-piracy advertising. Yes, admittedly, it’s dried up a little in recent years, but, depending on your age, there were more than a few iconic campaigns that were run over the years. – Following a report via TechDirt, however, it seems that somewhat ironically, these adverts might have done more harm than good.
Put simply, a collaborative effort of research has just just concluded that all anti-piracy advertising ever likely did was encourage piracy!
Anti-Piracy Adverts = More Piracy!
Probably one of the most memorable pieces of anti-piracy advertising was the “You wouldn’t steal a car” campaign that ran throughout the 1990s and early to mid-2000s. It was literally plastered everywhere including television spots, movie theatres, and as a precursor to practically every mainstream VHS release.
The study has, however, concluded that such advertising, despite its ability to stick in the memory, probably only ever brought wider attention to piracy which, by proxy, played a factor in its propagation, not reduction! – Why though? Well, ultimately though the use of really bad comparative examples!
“The most striking example might be the (in)famous ‘You would not steal a car’ awareness video aired in cinemas and on DVDs worldwide during the 2000s. It compared downloading a movie to various forms of stealing, including reasonably relevant ones (stealing a DVD in a store) and somewhat absurd others (stealing handbags, TVs, cars), which diluted down the message.”
Some Advice!
The research report effectively concluded by suggesting that there are three key areas (or errors) that any future anti-piracy campaigns should probably avoid (paraphrasing somewhat):
- Don’t even bother placing anti-piracy adverts before films or media releases. – The only people who’ll see them are those who actually legitimately paid for them! This isn’t your target audience!
- Don’t use celebrities as anti-piracy spokespersons. – People rarely like to be lectured by the rich and/or powerful who can afford to have higher moral standards!
- Stop making ludicrous comparisons. Ie. Stealing a car is clearly NOT the same as pirating a movie!
Anti-Piracy Campaigns CAN Work – If Done Right!
In my opinion, one of the best recent(ish) examples of solid anti-piracy action was seen in ‘Game Dev Tycoon’. What happened here? Well, in a nutshell, the creators of the game released the pirate version themselves. Sounds mad, right? Well, it did come with a pretty notable catch. – Namely, the game would generally run fine for an hour or so, but then your ‘games’ created within the sim would stop making money and you’d be greeted with the inception-like message above.
It got even better though as many of the pirates took to the official Steam forums to complain about the ‘bug’ clearly not knowing that what they were actually doing was revealing themselves as playing a pirated copy rather than the legitimate version that didn’t contain this issue! – It was, quite frankly, a masterstroke by the developer that clearly highlighted the most obvious problem when it comes to piracy!
If you do, however, want to go down the rabbit hole deeper, I’d strongly recommend you check out the video below from Ashen’s who did a fantastic look at anti-piracy measures in the UK and why, quite frankly, they were mostly bloody awful!
What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!
I hate that people so often blow off piracy as not that big of a deal. In the long-term scheme of life, I am sure they are right, but it speaks to character. A father stealing to feed his baby is wrong, but you understand it. Piracy, which is just another form of theft, is for a luxury item that one needs.
I’d like to preface this by saying that I don’t pirate or condone piracy, but I still think that in a lot of cases piracy is an almost-victimless crime, or even something that people would deliberately do to “stick it to the man”.
Unlike theft, piracy doesn’t directly hurt anyone. When a person steals something, they typically steal it from another person. That person loses something. They need to deal with the theft.
Piracy, at its bottom line, at most reduces the profits of someone (in many cases a huge corporation). That’s assuming that the alternative would have been you paying for the title and not just making do with others. With the glut of media available these days, just going for other content seems a more likely outcome. In any case, since it’s not actual stealing, it doesn’t directly hurt any other consumer of that title, and in many cases doesn’t hurt the creators of the title either, as they are work for hire (pirating indie games are an exception to this, for example).
It’s also worth noting that there are cases where there’s no real alternative to piracy, other than not getting the content. If Netflix decides that in your region a series goes only to season 5 and not 7 (due perhaps to other licensing) you’d be hard pressed to legally find it. There’s no directory of where you can legally get a specific title it in your region. If a game is no longer being sold, your only option to get a pirated copy.
So sure, doing something that’s illegal and morally questionable isn’t something I’d recommend doing, but piracy is much closer in my eyes to a pedestrian crossing an empty road on a red light than theft.
Unfortunately one will have to pirate the paper in order to see if it actually proved that anti-piracy advertising increased piracy. (Though my guess is that it didn’t.)