The great piracy debate has accomplished only one thing — the proliferation of alarmist buzz-words to make piracy sound ten times more sinister than it actually is. Industry types used to equate piracy with communism, but that no longer sounds scary enough. Terrorism is all the rage these days, and Japanese game publishers have decidedthat’sthe new gold standard when it comes to labeling software pirates. Yes, DS flash carts are just Al Qaeda in another form.
“The fact is that you can download any Nintendo DS game as much as you want, so there’s no way to even calculate the damage,”explainsAssociation of Copyright for Computer Software president Yutaka Kubota. “This is an issue that affects our national interests, and personally, I see it as a form of information terrorism that is crushing Japan’s industry.”
Don’t get me wrong — the fact that a game platform’s entire library can be ripped off without penalty is somewhat disturbing, and it’s a shame that so many good games suffer in sales thanks to so-called hardcore gamers stealing them. However, the reactions from the other side of the fence are just laughable. They need to be looking at ways of using piracy to their advantage, rather than sitting back and making hysterical claims to magazines.
Look what happened to the music industry. Perhaps if record labels had worked with online music distribution instead of fighting it, they wouldn’t be on their knees right now. Videogame publishers sometimes seem in danger of going the exact same way.
