{"id":4581,"date":"2010-06-14T13:40:36","date_gmt":"2010-06-14T19:40:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamingwithchildren.com\/?p=4581"},"modified":"2010-06-14T13:40:36","modified_gmt":"2010-06-14T19:40:36","slug":"piracy-relativism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/2010\/06\/14\/piracy-relativism\/","title":{"rendered":"Piracy Relativism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Piracy is rampant in our culture as digital copies of everything are just a download away (if you know how to find them). I’ve written on this subject many times since 1998. \u00a0Since the “problem” is now worse than ever before, and since I actually think “piracy” is GOOD for media companies, I thought I’d set these thoughts to blog. Maybe start an argument or at least get people thinking about it differently. Though it may seem otherwise by the time you get to the end of the article I want it clear that GamerDad DOES NOT endorse piracy. That said, here’s why it’s a GOOD thing:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Here’s a short story about Bob Dylan. Like him or not he owes a lot of his career to a friend in Minneapolis who had a HUGE collection of rare records. Back then there weren’t record stores specializing in archiving 1920+ or earlier records. No archives and few collectors. \u00a0These things were inaccessible to everyone. Most of Folk, Blues and early Jazz records simply had no influence on the current generation.<\/p>\n

Bob stole this music collection and listened to it until he was found and forced to give it back.<\/p>\n

What Bob did was illegal certainly, but according to him in his book and according to his history – if he hadn’t done this, he wouldn’t have impacted music in the way he did. When everyone else was covering known standards in folk – Bob could mentally reference forgotten legends. He could write like them, bringing old sounds to a new audience.<\/p>\n

Eventually much of this music became available and is archived and back in my day this meant I could listen to all this old stuff – if I could pay hundreds of dollars to track it down. Old catalog and out of print music didn’t exist or was out of reach.<\/p>\n

I argue that the ease of finding music from the dawn of recording to now – simply, cheaply, and even for free, is going to have a HUGE impact on music in the next few decades. Never before have artists had the access they have now. This means music, comics, books, art, film, video games.<\/p>\n

In short, extreme music knowledge means that poor people, instead of just lucky or rich people, will have access to all kinds of mentally stimulating and faded art.<\/p>\n

Then there’s me OOPS! Something weird happened so you’ll find the text below easier to read in the comments section below this article. Read that and then come back for the rest of the article:<\/p>\n

I benefitted from video game piracy, in fact, I believe it led directly to my caree<\/span>r. See, I lived in Singapore and Singapore in 1984, when I was 14, was rife with legal piracy. You could buy audio tapes, video and games for incredibly cheap prices and you couldn’t buy the real, legal versions. At least not at the stores. I have strong memories of taking a few blank disks (the floppy kind) and watching, in the store, as the owner used Disk Munchers to copy any game I wanted. Throw in another $0.25 and you could have a photocopy of the manual or the much needed anti-piracy codes or “wheels.” The result is that I played pretty much every game for the Apple IIe from 1978-1985. If I had a Commodore or an Atari computer, I’d have had even more options. It’s important to note that though this was clearly piracy, nobody really called it that. I never felt moral qualms. I just knew I was bored and poor and, well, everybody else was doing it.<\/span><\/span><\/h2>\n

So the main GOOD piracy provides is that it exposes people to things they wouldn’t normally be exposed to. A pirated Flight Sim might create a fan of simulations, a Jazz CD could spark a real passion for Jazz later in life and grabbing the latest Stephen King from a library or friend can sell many copies for the author later on. Free computer gaming made me buy 100’s of games and have a career as an expert.<\/p>\n

Relativism, yes. But since I’m one of the people my argument hurts in the short term, I’m coming by it honestly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Piracy is rampant in our culture as digital copies of everything are just a download away (if you know how to find them). I’ve written on this subject many times since 1998. \u00a0Since the “problem” is now worse than ever before, and since I actually think “piracy” is GOOD for media companies, I thought I’d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4581\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}