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GAMES piracy: A WARNING FROM HISTORY

17/1/2018

49 Comments

 
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Crime doesn't pay, apparently. Unfortunately, it's an all-too-frequent consequence that being born into a capitalist society doesn't pay either, so it's just something we're going to have to live with.

Yeah, what's that you say? "I hear you're a Communist now, Mr Biffo..."

​Whatever. 

Aside from being stopped once for speeding, many years ago, and another time in Norwich, because I got confused and drove into a bus lane, I've only ever been in proper trouble with "the po-po" once. I was 8 years old, and I'd broken into an abandoned vicarage across the road from my house.

​My mother was, ostensibly, the caretaker of the place, and I assumed this made it a sort of extension of our garden shed. After being caught, myself and two friends were driven off in a police car and taken to a police station where we were told, in no uncertain terms, that - caretaker mother or not - we had no place being there. 

I was hardly Ronnie Kray, admittedly, but this early brush with "The Fuzz" served to instil in me a lifelong fear of being sent to The Big House. Which was, I suppose, their intention with all the unnecessary shouting. Honestly, the way they were bellowing you'd think we'd thrown a nest full of endangered bird eggs at The Cenotaph.

It worked, though, and certainly contributed to why I didn't never do no computer game piracy not never.
LUDDITE
Partly, my aversion to software theft was also down to being a complete luddite, and not really knowing what I was doing with computers. Additionally, I've always liked the ritual of opening the packaging on a new game, and giving it a sniff. I wanted the pretty covers, the inlay booklet - it's one of the reasons I prefer a physical product to a download. It's also why I despair that game artwork is now so homogenised, and that they've done away with manuals.

However, I'd be lying if I said I never played a pirated game. I was, on one occasion, given a C90 cassette by a mate at school, which was loaded up with a bunch of ZX Spectrum games. To be honest, I never played them all, and while there was a slight frisson of illicit excitement in firing them up, it paled next to the thrill I got from legitimately, legally, owning something.

Piracy was rife at my school, back in the 80s though. While I might've kept out of it, everyone else was embroiled, and some of my peers - the nerdier ones anyway - were doing it on a pretty industrial scale.

​For them, the efforts of ELSPA - the European Leisure Software Publishers Association - and their anti-piracy ad campaigns had little effect. Even the threat of the F.A.S.T. - Federation Against Software Theft - hotline did little to discourage their contemptible behaviour. 


​Here's a brief gallery of some of ELSPA's print-based efforts to stop the scourge of software baddery..
WARNING!
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It's to the point, I suppose. Imagine you were a 14 year-old boy, though. Is it really going to stop you copying a mate's game? If it came down to it, you're not going to be the one paying the fine. Plus, you know that - more than likely - nobody's going to bother arresting you over a single pirated copy of "See It Shoot It".

Also, I doubt there was a teenager in the country who believed anybody would go to the effort of calling the F.A.S.T. hotline. Nobody wants to be a grass.

​I remember when Gary Samuels told the teacher that I was passing notes around the class saying he "sucked teacher's bums". Which I hadn't been; I'd merely passed the note between two other students. Still, he soon came to rue the day when the name "The Sucking Leech" was appended to the many other titles by which he was known.
THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE LAW
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The one on the right (on the wrong, surely?!?!!!?!!) is handling stolen goods is he?

Not if the one on the left is having anything to do with it. Look how tightly he's got a grip on that floppy. He's not letting that go for love nor monies. So to speak. 

Also, how do we know that Righty isn't just stroking the disk, or isn't about to shove it back towards Lefty, rejecting his criminal intent? This is all circumstantial. A photograph is a snapshot in time. There's a reason Instagrammers don't take selfies while they're wiping their bottoms... but perhaps they should. Maybe then we wouldn't all be peering at these perfect artificial moments, making us feel wretched about our own lives.

Where was I?

Oh yes. The biggest problem suffered by all of the ELSPA ads is that they just weren't scary enough. Nobody I knew ever believed the threats, never truly believed they were going to get into any kind of trouble.

If they'd wanted to have any real impact they should've backed up their menace with action, otherwise it's rather like an ineffectual parent who keeps telling the kids they're not going to get any Christmas presents, knowing full well that they'd never go through with it. Kids aren't stupid. We knew full well we weren't getting coal. Parents are idiots!

Couldn't ELSPA have made an example of a few selected children? Instead of making abstract threats, they could've gone round and beaten a few of them up, or spread rumours about them having micropenises, or something? 
THE BILL
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"A pirated game could result in a visit from you know who..." with the implication that the you-know-who is the bill (the po-po). It's still open to interpretation, though. Stupid people might've been expecting a surprise celebrity visit from Sergeant Bob Cryer, their favourite character from the ITV television drama show The Bill.

Unfortunately, the euphemistic phrase only serves to dilute the threat, like when an old person refers to sexual intercourse as "A bit of how's-your-father", whatever that's even supposed to mean.

If ELSPA wanted to undercut their authority then job done. If they'd wanted to put the fear of God into kids then they failed utterly. You could say they "a bit of how's-your-father-ed" it up.
JOHN THE NARK
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Perhaps the most misguided campaign by ELSPA and FAST were a series of comic strip ads featuring a character called "John".

Presumably, John was intended to be a regular sort of boy, someone the readers could relate to. Unfortunately, he came across more like the Viz character Jack Black - obsessed with his righteous cause, determined to uphold the letter of the law with little in the way of flexibility. John saw the world in black and white. There were no shades of grey. He likely grew up to be deputy leader of the UK Independent Party.

Look at John's face in the second panel of the above ad. Look at how utterly disgusted he is, how furious. John's friend could've received those pirated games from a schoolmate, but John doesn't care. He doesn't want details. As far as John is concerned, a crime is a crime, and he's straight on the phone to the F.A.S.T. Secret Police.
ONE DAY AT SCHOOL...
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Who do kids hate? Teachers. In this strip, kids are shown how they can get their revenge on teachers by grassing them up to the F.A.S.T. hotline, implying that they can be members of a sort of Hitler Youth division of ELSPA.

We're shown that John doesn't much like his maths teacher Mr Jones. Unfortunately, judging from the information in this strip, his dislike of Mr Jones - described here as a "rotter" - is due entirely to the teacher's practise of allowing students to copy games in his computer club, rather than because he lingered a little too long in the changing rooms after PE.

See how John revels in his efforts to get Mr Jones arrested. See also what I assume to be a continuity error in the final panel, where John's friend offers to share the reward with him. He's either hugely presumptuous that a raving authoritarian would even consider sharing his glories, or somebody got the speech bubble around the wrong way.
ONE DAY AT THE MARKET....
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This time John's at the market, where he risks grave injury by confronting the working class stall holder over a pirated copy of the game "Pow". Even after being told to "naff off", John doesn't give up in his crusade. 

"You should't be selling stuff like this," whinges John. "It's against the law! And I don't like it!"

The final panel adds a twist in the tale. John isn't, as we might've been led to believe, motivated entirely by moral indignation, but the promise of cold, hard, cash. We can speculate that John probably intends to spend his reward on a remote listening device, so that he can spy on his family members with the intention of catching them in the act of software piracy.
ONE SATURDAY AFTERNOON...
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Here we learn that John's surname is "Smith", and he appears to have found a friend with a similar taste for justice. This time they do a bit of investigating before calling F.A.S.T. - sending away for a list of games from a newspaper ad offering "Software Services". That could've been almost anything of course, but John and his friend have been doing this long enough to recognise the clues.

No doubt John and friend will be there at the trial, watching proudly from the public gallery, teeth clenched in rictus grin, tumescent and proud as another of their prey is sent to the gaol.

Children: the ones you should fear are not the po-po. It is not authority, or the shadowy figures behind the F.A.S.T. hotline. Beware the enemy within. Beware the "Johns".
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49 Comments
Super Bad Advice
17/1/2018 09:40:45 am

I used to get the occasional pirate Amiga game courtesy of the kid who lived across the road from me’s dad, who was - of course - a plain clothes officer in CID. I don't know where he got them, but I'd be willing to bet it was yoinked off some poor kid punting them out at a dank car boot sale rather than as a result of some thrilling, Miami Vice-style F.A.S.T. piracy bust.

Brilliantly, we once saw him “at work” undercover in a shop. He was wearing a beige mac & flat cap in mid-August, and would only have been barely more conspicuous if he'd attached a rotating blue light to his head and wandered round doing Jim Davidson 'nick nick' noises.

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Chinny Hill
17/1/2018 10:11:12 am

A friend kept on being offered free drinks and extra courses at a restaurant he occasionally frequented. Eventually it became clear that the owner was under the misapprehension, perhaps due to the way he looked, that he was CID. He stopped visiting the restaurant.

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Chris
17/1/2018 11:35:56 am

One of my dad's policeman friends came round once with some Amiga games for us to copy.

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Paul Morris
17/1/2018 09:40:49 am

Last Friday I asked about putting a Morse and Lewis graphic on the back of a hoodie, having figured out a way to do it Mr Biffo, I was wondering if I could have your permission to copy the said graphic so I can put it on the back of my hoodie?

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I see dead people
17/1/2018 09:45:12 am

John the Nark in the second panel is basically a young Donald Trump.

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DEAN
17/1/2018 09:46:00 am

Morning all!

The problem, as I see it, is the term 'Pirates'. It makes it all sound so exciting and that.

The reality is a person with a pair of tape recorders or a load of little boxes slowly filling up on a screen with curiously complex file names.... a far cry from the glamour of open seas and blue sky freedom.

I'd suggest calling these types 'chief petty officers' - nobody wants to be one of them - hated equally by the officers and the crew.... probably.
Indeed a figure of pitiful derision and only in that precarious position because of a lust for gold (money).

What's a pirates favourite letter?
NO - not argh (R)! It's the sea (C).

Okay, give all that a moment to sink in and then consider this - when you 'chief petty officer' a game you're basically taking money that could have otherwise gone towards paying the insanely exorbitant mooring fees for an EA exec's 60 foot Princess motorboat at a gorgeous marina somewhere really nice. Those marina berths don't come cheap - and, if you think about it, they're the real pirates here.... it's even got something to do with boats.

On a wild tangent - we called my grandmother Shenannygrans because she kept a matchbox filled with insect stingers in her frocks pocket. she'd slip them into your glass for a laugh and then knock it from your sipping hand warning you about bad juice.

But yeah, they should chop off their heads and place them on those green boxes full of internet on every street. Send out the message that they're not messing about.

I mean who here hasn't thought the same - you're watching a dvd you've paid for and you can't skip the piracy ad... there's a genius to it!

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Paul Morris
17/1/2018 09:52:14 am

Do you remember those bloody awful knock of Nigel adverts about not buying copied DVD's?

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DEAN
17/1/2018 09:58:08 am

Possibly - is they them ones with the touchy tracking?

Paul Morris
17/1/2018 10:11:24 am

I just remember the god awful song, makes me stomch churn just thinking about them

DEAN
17/1/2018 10:21:05 am

Nah - I can't remember any songs - can you whistle me a few bars?

Chris
17/1/2018 11:34:12 am

"Excuse me, I bought Trainspotting from you last week, but all I got was a lump of cheese."

DEAN
17/1/2018 12:04:38 pm

Rings a distant bell, Chris - you don't have the chorus knocking about between your ear's do you, me hearty!

Chris
17/1/2018 12:07:18 pm

That's from Armstrong & Miller :)

"Got no trains in it, suppose that's my fault as well?"

Chinnyhill
17/1/2018 09:54:42 am

Suspect some of the earlier ads wouldn't make it past the ASA today as they are untrue. A pirated game is not handling stolen goods.

Fast were pretty ineffective and I suspect it was one bloke with a load of money from software publishers that he had to spend to make it look like something was being done. The real problem was industrial piracy. In '91 I went to a software shop in Malta and every last game was a pirate copy. From what others have said to me when I recount this story this practice was commonplace among many Southern European countries. Piracy on an industrial scale. Not forgetting markets across the UK including the infamous Barrowlands in Glasgow which New Computer Express ran an 'expose' on.

Today I thank the kings of pirates, the cracking teams. Reviewing games on real hardware as I do some stuff is a pain in the backside to get running. The ST especially is awkward to get stuff that actually runs off of floppy. Who comes to my rescue time and time again. The Pompey Pirates, The Medway Boys and others who cleanly copied games that just work! The amount of times those lads have saved my bacon when I can't get an ST version working I'd buy them all a drink!

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Dr. Budd Buttocks, MD
17/1/2018 12:04:15 pm

I think the laws in many places were a lot more lax in those days. Also we forget how limited and slow software distribution could be. Pirates and bootleggers were usually quicker to fill the gaps in the market in the more isolated regions.

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Dougie
17/1/2018 02:18:31 pm

Yep, I went to Tenerife in the early 90s and there were many shops packed full of postcards, jewellery, and 100-in-1 Game Boy cartridges.

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Alastair
17/1/2018 10:17:58 am

"See it, shoot it" sounds like they were entirely dismissive of games and the people who played them.

Or perhaps it was some sort of cleverly subversive game written and named to take the P out of more mainstream games.

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MENTALIST
17/1/2018 12:36:43 pm

It sounds like an excellent name of some sort of meta-deconstructionist game project. So much so, that I just checked on the Steam website to see if it'd already been done.

Steam's closest suggestion was "Design it, Drive it : Speedboats".

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Scott c
17/1/2018 11:46:48 am

...so here's something I wonder if any of you remember. It's a tiny bit off-topic but I've asked elsewhere online over the years and no-one else knows WTF I'm on about. I'm hoping this little community might be the place to find the answer, so here goes.

Back in the mid- to late-1980s I worked in an independent computer shop. Not a big one by modern retail standards but big for the area, plenty profitable during its heydey. At some point we purchased or rented on trial and had fitted an instore software tape-duplication system.

I don't recall much about it but it worked like this:

1. Joe Punter would pick a game from the shelf. These were displayed as normal retail packs (cassette boxes with inlays, mostly)
2. Joe would bring it to the counter.
3. We would take a blank tape from a supplied stock and shove it in the duplicator machine.
4. We'd press a button and the machine would produce a copy. The game data from a hard disk or something: we didn't have to insert an original tape.
5. After a few minutes, the tape would be ready.
6. Joe Punter would pay. I can't remember if he got a full retail box but he certainly got a tape with a handwritten label.

But... it was all legit. The stock of titles was very limited as I recall and I assume there must've been some incentive for the punter, like a reduced price or something. And for us, as the shop, the (largely theoretical) incentive was that we didn't have to keep as many physical titles/cassettes in stock.

It might be possible that this mystery counter-top machine also produced rudimentary cassette inlays and what have you but I have no memory of that -- just a memory of the machine's existence and the basic process, as outlined above. It also meant, I think, that we could (again in theory) offer masses more titles than we could ever hope to stock.

Perhaps it was an isolated regional trial by the software industry (this store was in Norfolk)? No-one I've ever spoken to since have ever heard of and still less encountered this thing. I know I didn't imagine it, because I worked in the shop and it was both a novelty and a nightmare for the brief time we had it.

Scott.

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David W
17/1/2018 05:47:50 pm

I'm stumped. It sounds plausible as a briefly test-marketed failure, but I can't find a single magazine reference to a system like that.

Do you remember any of the games? I'd assume it was one software company working with their back catalogue: an industry-wide initiative would almost certainly have got press coverage. Knowing what was available might help narrow down the search.

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Dr. Budd Buttocks, MD
17/1/2018 07:50:38 pm

I have a very vague recollection of a similar system being featured on bad influence or gamesmaster or something like that. Can't remember if it was disks or cartridges

Scott C
18/1/2018 09:27:34 am

I have no recollection of the games, no. It could've had a stock of 10 titles on the hard disk or 100, or 1000. My gut feeling is that it was a few dozen titles and we had the machine in the store for only a few months, but it's all so hazy. But, like you, I've found that no amount of Googling will turn up any clues as to what it might've been...

Craig Grannell link
17/1/2018 07:55:37 pm

On the C64, there was a system like this called EDOS (Electronic Distribution of Software). Shops held masters and ran off legal copies for you. Towards the end of the C64's life, it was the only legal way to get games that wasn’t mail order.

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Craig again
17/1/2018 07:59:29 pm

Here's a catalogue, if the site allows URLs: http://cpcrulez.fr/download.php?a=UoKun5bWisDb25K_hcHoms3Ojg==

Mike
17/1/2018 07:56:15 pm

They 100% had this at John Menzies in Wigan - I still have a copy of one of the Amstrad CPC Dizzy games that was replicated this way somewhere, so it was definitely more than just a regional pilot.

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Chinny Hill
17/1/2018 08:53:49 pm

Was it a sod to load. Purchased a few games like it in JM in Bomo and with rare exceptions the tapes always required different from usual levels on my external tape recorder. Everyones A Wally being a particularly hard title to load.

Chinny Hill
17/1/2018 08:52:02 pm

It was called EDOS or something similar. John Menzies in Bournemouth had such a machine and could produce tapes and ST and Amiga floppies.

The boxes were on the shelf, either originals or in a special EDOS branded box. You took it to the counter and they duplicated the game for you.

Problem was you didn't get an 'original' tape and neither was it as reliable as a normal cassette. I recall many of the tapes being a sod to load.

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David W
17/1/2018 09:14:07 pm

Well, that catalogue confirms everything. "John Menzies EDOS" appears to be the magic string that returns further details, for example:

http://hol.abime.net/hol_search.php?N_ref_publisher=764

Thanks, everyone.

On a different tangent, I'm still searching for the issue of Amiga Action with the legendary final "Son of Boggit" rant.

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Scott C
18/1/2018 09:31:52 am

Yep, I think that must me it! It's not quite how I remember the machine but, tbh, I don't really have any clear memories of it. And this ticks so many other boxes that I'm confident this is the one. Thanks all! Amazing work.

Matty link
17/1/2018 09:36:37 pm

I think the tape-tape in-store system was called "Software Distributed Electronically" or something like that, came along quite late in the 8-bit machine's lifespans if I remember (about 1989 or thereabouts). They used standard tapes which, unlike the tapes games were usually written to, had about 30m of tape in them and so you couldn't just flip the tape over once you'd loaded on one side because there was still 25m of hiss left.

It seems to have been a money-saving operation by the software houses, budget houses like Mastertronic seemed to be the main users of the system. The tapes themselves, apart from being the wrong fucking length, were nasty cheap looking things that looked like they might as well have been pirate tapes. I might have a couple leftover kicking about somewhere.

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HotSoapyBeard link
17/1/2018 11:51:05 am

I had a maths teacher named mr Jones. He always had a harrowed expression and once went crazy when he found out some kids had been messing on his computer in the break. His time in the slammer must have made him paranoid we would turn him in again...

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Blackbeard
17/1/2018 11:53:27 am

My dad and his mate pretty much exclusively pirated games when I was a kid, to the point where they were on some kind of mailing list and would receive collections to rip and pass on. It was so exciting when a new disk arrived!

This shaped my attitude for most of my years. Particularly with the X360, it felt like pirating games and flashing the DVD-roms was a hobby and felt like beating the man. Always staying one step ahead to avoid the XBL bans etc.

It's only this current console generation that I've given up piracy for good... that and the advent of the likes of Steam, which makes actually buying games more convenient than fucking around with cracks etc etc.

I feel bad in many respects.

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Neptunium
17/1/2018 12:20:45 pm

"..it felt like pirating games and flashing the DVD-roms was a hobby and felt like beating the man."

I think most piracy feels like this. I was ecstatic to watch Force Awakens in HD weeks before the Blu-Ray dropped through the door from Amazon. Years before that I used to enjoy going to the secret FTP every week and getting a high quality copy of Futurama before it had even aired in the States. How did they do that?

There's a feeling of victory getting something for free, and the pirated product is often better than the original - whether it's the ability to back it up in the days of floppys, being able to bypass the lame-o-copy protection screen that insisted you read word 34 of line 24 on page 14 of an impossible to read booklet printed on dark brown paper, or getting a DVD that doesn't have mandatory trailers at the beginning.

It's interesting that the music industry have pretty much given up with copy protection, and albums now come with pre-ripped MP3's for your delection. There will always be people who want stuff for free, but there will always be people who will buy stuff - and the easier you make it for them to use what they've bought the bigger the market.

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Dr. Budd Buttocks, MD
17/1/2018 11:57:56 am

People like John do actually exist.

I have been a wanton and unapologetic pirate from nearly day one. I can't speak for everyone, but in my case the amount of actual lost sales to the software industry is probably miniscule. My old disk boxes were full of floppies that I was, on reflection, glad that I didn't buy.

But I can say for almost certain that piracy has been a net benefit to the computer and software industry. The wide availability of free games was a huge incentive to buy a computer, and everyone knew it. Also there have been a few studies that showed pirates actually buy more games than anyone.

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Neth
17/1/2018 12:49:51 pm

There used to be a guy in a shitty wee computer repair shop in the near where I grew up who sold pirated Atari ST games - usually Automation and Medway Boys and Pompey Pirates "menus" - for five quid a pop.

Despite the fact everyone knew about it, he made it seem like a very clandestine affair - you'd have to go to one shop, ask for him, they'd ring ahead, then tell you if you could go round or not. All that cloak and dagger stuff made it particularly exciting, especially when you're only 11.

That said, if I'd know I could've "done a John" and pocketed a grand for dobbing him in, I probably would have. That equated to a lot of Push Pops in 1991.

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Treacle
17/1/2018 02:09:27 pm

"Hello is that F.A.S.T.?
Yes I'd like to report that rotter Mr Biffo, he's made pirate copies of your adverts and posted them on line.
Hello, are you still there?
Hello!"

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Mrtankthreat
17/1/2018 02:49:25 pm

My favourite bit of the copyright warning on dvds was that you weren't supposed to play them on oil rigs as it was considered a public performance. Bit harsh really and I always wanted to know who policed that.

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Nick
17/1/2018 03:12:47 pm

John's battered body was found washed up on the Aberdeenshire coast.

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Treacle
17/1/2018 03:50:40 pm

I imagine the stormtroopers of F.A.C.T. rappelling down from their helicopters, ready to show those rig workers that hiding in the middle of the North Sea is no protection from their all seeing eye.

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David W
17/1/2018 05:34:01 pm

You also weren't supposed to play them in schools. The teachers must have thought we were illiterate.

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M.Lawrenson
17/1/2018 06:38:43 pm

Didn't stop some some schools. I remember watching a video in the classroom on the day my school broke up for the Christmas holidays in 1989. Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade, it was. We knew it was pirated as it looked like a 3rd generation copy. And had Russian subtitles. It was brought in by one of the teachers.

British education made me the man I am today.

John (no relation)
17/1/2018 05:23:12 pm

I used to copy some tapes for the Speccy back in the day. But I also bought loads. I'm pretty sure my piracy activities never actually cost anyone anything - I bought 100% of the games I was going to buy. So I've never felt so much as a slightest pang of guilt.

Nowadays I may occasionally watch the odd TV programme via less than legitimate means. But I also pay the BBC, Amazon, Netflix and so on. It seems to balance out.

I also do quite a lot of burglaries but I also... Okay that one is hard to defend...

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Meatballs-me-branch-me-do
17/1/2018 05:28:23 pm

Given “John” has the superpower of being able to change his appearance from panel to panel (right down to his age), his talents were wasted trying to stop people copy some poxy Amiga game (which was a dying format, remember)

I remember, Biffster, when you went on a rampage of “warez rulez!!!!!11” jokes and it was very funny.

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Bloggo link
17/1/2018 06:21:32 pm

I’ve been pirating the identity of the FAST adverts for years. They haven’t found me yet ‘cos I’m based on Sealand

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Matty link
17/1/2018 10:01:20 pm

Someone mentioned above that they don't pirate at all any more, I think that's become very common, especially with the advent of digital downloads, frequent sales on games and online updates. Piracy still happens but it seems to have stopped being a mainstream thing.

I think the "golden age" for piracy, if that's really an appropriate way of putting it, was the early '90s. Piracy on the disk-based computers was absolutely rife, and thanks to programs like X-Copy it was extremely easy for just about anyone to do. Most Amiga/ST owners only had a handful of original boxed games, many had none at all other than the ones that came with the system. There was piracy on the tape-based machines as well but it was more of a "faff" and the nature of tape-to-tape copying meant that an original was generally needed along with a twin-deck tape recorder. Disk piracy was just much, much easier so it really took off. And the whole "cracking" culture helped as well, especially one-disking of games. Those FAST adverts were a staggering waste of time and money, as anti-piracy measures always tend to be.

I remember by the early 2000s, I hardly saw pirated games other than "warez" sites and the like. Now, I can't recall the last time I saw a pirated version of a recent game, it just seems like a pointless waste of effort these days.

Couple of things: I reckon back in the '90s I would have bought roughly 20% of the games I pirated if I'd not been able to pirate them, most pirated games were almost certainly not lost sales but I've never believed the "people never pirated games they wanted enough to buy" line because, in my own first hand and second hand experience, it was staggeringly untrue. Whenever magazines had "debates" (fairly pointless, of course, because the magazines could not condone piracy even if they wanted to) on piracy in their letters page there was always someone claiming they "copied games to test them, if I like them I'll buy them". Did anyone actually do this? I think at the time we all laughed at what an obvious lie this was, I literally never saw or heard of it happening in the real world.

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Alberto Veeohfive
17/1/2018 10:53:25 pm

I actually occasionally do that now with expensive pieces of software (DAW) and PC games when I'm not sure how they'll run on my piece of shit machine and there isn't a demo available
I'll use them for a day to see how they run. If they're good I'll always buy them. If not I'll ditch them.

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Alberto Veeohfive
17/1/2018 10:47:08 pm

Ah I remember the days well on the ST and the Amiga having been one of the 'doc' typer uppers for D-Bug, Automation and a couple of others.
Man some of those manuals were needlessly long, especially the ones that had the copy protection where you had to input 'page 36, paragraph 4 line 3, word 8'.
I also remember some of those copy protection measures being either ridiculously easy or ridiculously difficult to remove.
I think it was the manual to 'Ishtar' for some reason that sticks in my head as taking for fucking ever to type up.

Whilst my mates were out throwing stones at windows and generally winding up the local community I was hunched over my Amiga or ST typing up some drivel.
A unique way of keeping out of trouble at 14
but at the same time doing something illegal.

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Lummox60N
18/1/2018 11:15:10 am

Them were the days. My favourite bit of pirate-confoundlery was the Jet Set Willy thing, with the sets of colours in a grid. The fact that I knew several folk who'd gone to the bother of laboriously writing out the colour combinations in every box, some opting for super-elaborate felt-tip pen replicas, spoke volumes for the determination to save a few quid. And volumes for how highly regarded JSW was.
Then JSW2 came along and they made the grid bigger...and STILL folk were only too willing to make their own decryption grid.

I forget where I was going with this, but there was NOTHING more exciting than being handed a naked C90 tape, and whiling away the weekend discovering what delights were on it.
Usually the best of the games was buried in the middle of the tape, and was a ball-ache to locate. I had one with "Trap Door" on it. That was the ONLY worthwhile game on it. And it was so frustrating to locate I went out and bought the game. YAY piracy.

Imagine if publishers had jumped on that as a concept? £9.99 for a "Mystery Tape"...87% pure dross thereon...it would probably have sold like warm baked produce, and loads of aspiring programmers would've got exposure for their half-arsed efforts as buyers tried to locate the "good" game on the tape.

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colincidence link
18/1/2018 10:04:41 pm

If all those blondians are John, his age varies greatly. I'm interested in learning the chronology of these.

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