Essay#2 Like most people, sometimes I am a pirate. One thing I don't pirate, however, is video games. I tend to buy them through software “Steam”. Steam is an application owned by a company named Valve which allows you to buy videogames and download them directly to your hard drive, rather than picking up a copy in the store. Why would I do that, instead of just pirating them off the internet (which I have the technical know-how to do)? First we look at all the benefits steam has to offer. Back in May 2008, Valve brought cloud storage to Steam, allowing for all saved games, replays, screenshots, and other files found in any Steam game to be saved on Valve's servers. This enables gamers to access their save files regardless of what hardware they're using. Simply logging into your Steam account will allow you to pick up right where you were last playing, even if you happen to be on somebody else's PC miles away from your own. Second, Steam has a social networking service built-in that lets me see what games my friends own and are playing, and helps me find people to play with. Steam is always offering crazy sales. You'll turn on your computer and routinely see games marked down by 75%. These sales are for "a limited time only" and you practically feel like you're losing money if you don't buy something. In consequence, my hard drive is filled with games I haven't even had a chance to play yet. Lastly, Steam is a very small and clean program. All your games are packed into one program that installs them neatly and efficiently, leaving your computer desktop clutter free. This overall ease of use is why Steam is so popular today. Steam has some disadvantages, most notably that you need to be connected to the internet to play your games. Also the fact that I don’t have hard copies of the games I purchase means if Steam ever completely failed as a business I wouldn’t have access to my games anymore. Overall though, it's not only a good way to buy games, it's actually better than pirating them. Pirated games aren't in the cloud. Pirated games don't show that your friends are playing them, and they certainly aren’t cleanly installed. Steam, in other words, competes with piracy. I think the conventional wisdom is that you can't compete with piracy: how can you do better than free, overpaid record executives moan? But there are a lot of disadvantages to piracy. You have to go to untrustworthy websites with popup ads that infect your computer with viruses. You risk getting poor quality files, music that sounds tiny or blurry movies with Russian subtitles that were filmed on cell phones. Most importantly, you have to break the law. Piracy has become the better option when we look how some of these industries treat us. Have you been to a movie recently? First, they increased the price to around 14 dollars per ticket on average. They gouge you on concessions. They show 30 minutes of ads. They don't sell you specific tickets, so for popular movies you risk having to sit in an absurd location, where you can't even see the screen. Half the time the audience is full of obnoxious people, who talk or look at their cell phones, or kick the back of your seat. If you want to watch the movie in the comfort of your own home, you have to wait months before it comes out for rental. If the movie industry is serious about dealing with piracy, they should make it more convenient to see movies. We’re the consumer here, we should be able to enjoy the product as we see fit. Don’t make us wait, don’t force us to drive anywhere if we prefer the comfort of our own home for that evening. Embrace new technology and use it to redefine the movie viewing experience. I’m pretty sure most of us wouldn’t mind a reasonable admission fee once you do. Music is (or was) just as bad. Let’s look at the program “iTunes”, which has been the standard for music management software for a long time. Unlike most Apple products, it's gotten slower and more unwieldy over the years. It wants to be upgraded about twice a month, and it demands constant attention during the process. iTunes set a limit on how often you could transfer your songs from one device to another. In other words: if you paid for content, you were actually punished with an inferior product. It simply blows my mind that anyone would be so shortsighted. Not only that, but prices are generally fixed: no sales to get excited about, no weekly deals. Considering that iTunes is basically just a jukebox application, it puts a remarkable strain on your system resources. It isn’t too bad if you have a few gigabytes of RAM and newish processor, but it still seems excessive for just playing music. Apple got some things right (letting people buy a song a time is key) and they're now moving to the cloud system for storing music. Because the iPod was so successful, (due to its simplistic design) I don’t think we will see the iTunes software disappearing any time soon. With the amount of music the average modern person listens too, we need software that matches the ease and fluidity with which we use our iPod’s. My advice for the music and television industry would be to make your product so convenient for your customers, that the idea of pirating your product would make them hate themselves a little. I think most people would like to pay for movies, games and music but it becomes too easy to rationalize pirating over spending money, especially in this economy. When money becomes tight the first thing to go is indulgences, like movies and music. If you can provide a well made software that’s easy to use at a reasonable price, you will create demand for your product even when people are living frugally. For products like iTunes, I would tell them to create more social aspects to their product, like chat rooms or profiles. We want to know what music our friends and family are listening to, much in the same way I enjoy seeing what games my buddies are playing. I think, for a long time, publishers, record companies and movie studios got used to competing solely on the quality of their content, and either forgot about (or tacitly agreed to forget about) competing on price, the delivery of their services, and how they treat their artists. If they want to stop piracy, they don't need fancy new legal tools or different legislation. They just need to start thinking about how they treat their customers. It's been so long since they've done so; I honestly think some corporations have forgotten what it's like. Perhaps piracy will finally force that to change.