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The Golden Age Of Piracy

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Quon McCoy

Merriam Webster’s definition of the word Pirate is “someone who attacks and steals from a ship at sea.” This infers that for as long as there have been ships and boats of the like there have been other ships stealing, pillaging, and burning honest workers. The first recorded pirate was Anicetus who rebelled against the Roman Empire in 69 AD. And since the fall of the Roman Empire didn’t occur until the 400’s it’s safe to say he wasn’t all that successful at rebelling. Ever since then the reports of pirates began to raise. Up until the Golden Age of Piracy during the late 1600’s to the early 1700’s pirates were getting more and more bold and common.

Today, pirates work on a different medium. Digital pirates steal anything that …show more content…
If someone justifies pirating by thinking “I’m just one person what harm could it do,” that train of thought is why pirating is so bad to begin with. Yes, if only one person opts out paying $60 when millions of others actually pay that one person doesn’t matter much. But that isn’t the case. PC gamer put out an article discussing gaming piracy. They put out an open survey asking people if they had ever pirated a game and of the 50 thousand people who took the survey, 90% have pirated at least one game. While that doesn’t sound bad, know that they reported 25% of those people said they pirated over 50 games. That really hurts the industry because if those 50 thousand are representative of the whole then that means millions if not billions of dollars lost. So let’s say there are one million people playing a game. This game is a full prices AAA game priced at $60. A total of $60 million in revenue. But there is an indisputably high chance there are people who are going pirate it, say 25%. That is a total of $15 million worth of lost revenue. Now if I was given a small loan of a tenth of that lost revenue I would be set for a long while. Loss of revenue isn’t the only thing that is lost when a game is pirated, look at it like you’ve worked on a project for a whole year. It’s been your life day in and day out and it finally goes out for the public to enjoy and it turns out that many people just downloaded it without paying for it; this thing you revolved your life around for so long. Some of that pride it seems would be lost because the toxic nature of some people would bleed onto your

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