Anti-piracy farce is biggest theft of all

Published on Friday 15 June 2007 00:06

"YOU wouldn't steal a car. You wouldn't steal a handbag. You wouldn't steal a television. Downloading pirated films is stealing." Oh, just sod right off.

You only ever see this Federation Against Copyright Theft warning implying that you're a criminal when you've paid good money to either go and see a film or when you've bought a DVD. In the days of video you could happily wind past trailers and other such time-wasting garbage as Simon Bates waffling about ratings, but, thanks to Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies such as Macrovision, our DVDs are locked, and we're punished for buying them.

The same sort of punishment has also been meted out to buyers of music. In 2005 Sony compromised the security of thousands of computers by damaging their operating systems with a DRM "rootkit" which, when removed, disabled CD drives and left them open to internet attacks.

We've paid, so why waste our time trying to imply that we're criminals, especially when none of these measures can, have or ever will stop professional pirates?

Take that minute or so of lost time and multiply it by, let's say, a million people watching a DVD each day in the UK (which is a pretty conservative estimate). A million minutes is almost two years. That means that every month this anti-piracy ad wastes a total of 60 years of people's lives.

Oh, and another thing. If it's such a bad thing that the pictures on pirated DVDs might sometimes have people walking across the screens, how is that different to being in a cinema... with people walking past the screen? At least you don't have to smell their nachos. Drop the DRM.