Game piracy runs rampant on the Internet

Why would Pittman — husband, father and assistant scoutmaster for his local Boy Scout troop — risk so much for his illegal hobby?

“Because it made me feel important,” he says.  “I wasn’t a jock or one of the cool kids, but suddenly, I was the go-to guy. I could do stuff the average Joe couldn’t.”

That feeling of notoriety is addictive, says Hollenshead. “They may be a completely anonymous person without any other claim to fame,” he says. “But within their community, they’re perceived with godlike status.”

And not all of the pirates are good guys with a bad habit, like Pittman. That CD of “Spider Man 3” you bought for $4? It could get to level three and then cut out. That free copy of “Command and Conquer 3” you just downloaded onto your sanitized home PC? It could have a virus.

“Games were one of the first pieces of software to be pirated,” says Ron Teixeira of the National Cyber Security Alliance. “People started taking it seriously when games started making more money than the motion picture industry.”

Teixeria says it’s tough to know how many computers get infected by viruses from pirated games — mainly because no one wants to come forward and admit it. But it makes sense that cracked games, so easy to find on the Internet, would carry the occasional Trojan horse. 

“A hacker needs only to find a way to get a malicious program into a computer and use it as a network,” he says.

Even though law enforcement has stepped up the pressure on pirates in recent years — both at a federal and local level — the industry still faces an uphill battle. Much of the pirate trafficking takes place outside of the U.S., in places like Russia and China. And it's tough to get law enforcement there to care much about our copyright and intellectual property laws.

What's more, the copyright protections developers place on CDs can be cracked — and with an army of hackers out there, it’s practically assured that your product will be illegally uploaded to the Internet. From there, it spreads like wildfire, and at that point, there’s little companies can do to stem the tide.

“If you had a piece of software that was broken, you release a patch,” says Hollenshead.  “But once your software’s been cracked or hacked, that version propagates faster and faster until it fills up illegitimate distribution channels.”

So why fight it? Maybe game pirate sites have sprouted to fill the same void that music consumers saw in the late 1990s. The void that gave rise to illegal file-sharing on Napster and Kazaa — but ultimately led to iTunes. There’s a business that doesn’t seem to be suffering much from the illegal peer-to-peer music trade.

The game industry will tell you that the typical game is too big to download — and that the average game consumer won’t wait for a 1-gigabyte file to trickle onto their home PC.

But what, then, explains the popularity of Xbox Live and nascent digital distribution sites like Direct2Drive and Steam? Doesn’t the sheer number of BitTorrent sites with thousands of copies of cracked “Quake 4” and “Grand Theft Auto” prove that consumers do want to get their games the same way they’re getting everything else these days?

Maybe that’s not the answer at all, though. Perhaps the answer is much simpler: Pirated games exist because people get a thrill out of cracking games — and because there will always be people who want something for nothing.

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