Awarenes of Piracy
Thursday, October 8, 2009 by Bwads
When the subject of piracy is raised most people immediately think of either two things. Downloading music from the internet via blog or P2P websites, or acquiring bootlegged copies of movies, often from the internet as well. As much as we all hate to admit it we've all tried it at least once, the temptation of getting something for free instead of forking out hard earned cash too hard to resist. While these are two of the most common forms of piracy by no means does the issue stop there. Having worked in a video game store for the past year the issue of piracy of games has become clearly apparent to me as a potential threat to the industry. It never ceases to amaze me the number of people who aren't actually aware that it is ILLEGAL to mod their console so it can install games on an internal hard drive.
The most common question I'm asked is whether we sell the 'R4' or 'chip' SD cards for the Nintendo DS. What these do is allow programmers to create their own software and play it via the DS console. The problem lies in that the internet is an easy to place to find ROM files, backups of console games that people have saved to their PC. In effect it is entirely possible to download any game you could ever want for the DS for free off the internet, saving the files to the SD card, and never needing to purchase a physical copy of the games you want. This is entirely illegal and it is a serious concern that so many people are completely oblivious to this fact. Part of this can be attributed to a lack of knowledge and awareness on the matter, especially in older generation. The vast majority of customers in my store are parents buying for their children, who most of the time know far less about the games and gaming than their kids do. As such once a child hears about the method of getting pirated games, unaware that it is illegal, and tells their parents, they immediately think of only one thing - less money to spend!
One would think that upon learning this fact people would be a little surprised or feel a bit guilty for trying such a thing. Sadly most people I politely inform of their potentially illegal intentions look like they couldn't care less. Has piracy become so common place that not only does nobody even consider what they are doing to be illegal, but aren't even aware of what piracy actually is? If this isn't the situation yet, I believe its not far off.