The laws surrounding file-sharing and online copyright infringement are confusing, and nothing proves it quite so startlingly as a press release that landed in my inbox today.

The Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) sent over a statement about the ACS Law case currently stumbling to a close in the Patents County Court.

First, a quick round-up, in case you haven’t been following the story as closely as we have (I’ve never spent so much time in court, and hopefully I never will again):

ACS sent out letters demanding payment from people it accused of illegally downloading content. Many paid up, some didn’t. After thousands of letters, ACS Law’s sole solicitor Andrew Crossley finally brought 27 cases to court. Then, Crossley and his client, porn licensee Media CAT, promptly tried to ditch the cases — or discontinue them, to use the proper legal term.

Despite the two firms since shutting up shop entirely, the judge at the Patents County Court has refused to end the case, in order to give the defendants the chance to claim costs against ACS and Media CAT, and to give the real rights holders — as in, the people who made the pornography, who are effectively unknown — a chance to join the case. If they don’t — and no-one expects them to — the trial looks set to end in March, without any of the evidence really being examined.

‘Indignation’

If that wasn’t too mind-boggling, let’s head back to FAST, and its head-scratching email. FAST wants the case to continue, apparently to a full trial, with the lobby group’s General Counsel Julian Heathcote-Hobbins saying:

“The indignation about one or two law firm’s antics is a distraction from the real issue. People should know that if they wish to ‘lift’ a product, it carries a risk and that is of being caught. We would never question that due process must be followed and other rights respected, but these reasons are a smoke screen that illegal file-sharing should still be tackled.”

Let me jump in here. This case isn’t about “indignation”. The excellent Judge Colin Birss isn’t using due process and “other rights” as an excuse to shut down the case, though they would be perfectly good reasons to do so.

He’s doing exactly what FAST wants; he’s trying to keep the case going, long enough to ensure the real rights holders have a chance to join, and that the defendants can’t be “vexed” a second time over accusations of illegally downloading the same porn using questionable evidence. No-one here is advocating illegal file-sharing, least of all the defendants.

Public scrutiny

FAST continues: “Judge Colin Birss at the patents County Court in London has himself stated that ‘I cannot imagine a system better designed to create disincentives to test the issues in the court’ and that it cannot drop the cases to avoid what he terms ‘avoid(ing) public scrutiny.”

FAST seems unclear who is trying to avoid public scrutiny: it’s ACS Law and Media CAT. The defendants aren’t — they’re fighting to keep the case going, to pull the weak evidence against them into the spotlight, so it’s clear they’ve been harassed for no good reason.

The “system” Judge Birss rails against is ACS Law’s own system, not the court’s. Here’s what Birss said in his judgement, where that half sentence I’ve highlighted comes from:

“Simple arithmetic shows that the sums involved in the Media CAT exercise must be considerable. 10,000 letters for Media CAT claiming £495 each would still generate about £1 million if 80% of the recipients refused to pay and only the 20% remainder did so. Note that ACS Law’s interest is… they receive 65% of the revenues from the letter writing exercise. In fact Media CAT’s financial interest is actually much less than that of ACS Law. Whether it was intended to or not, I cannot imagine a system better designed to create disincentives to test the issues in court. Why take cases to court and test the assertions when one can just write more letters and collect payments from a proportion of the recipients?”

The judge wants the evidence tested, the defendants want judical scrutiny — the only parties who don’t are the claimants themselves.

No comment?

More from the lobby group’s lawyer: “FAST is simply not going to comment on the actions of the two companies involved.”

FAST should comment on the two firms: it should call them out for making the anti-file-sharing lobby look ridiculous and horrible.

“Our argument is that the cases therefore need to be seen to conclusion so that if the judiciary criticises methods, these may be in turn improved meaning the innocent are not accused and those who persist in this activity can be held to account.”

If this case does ever reach a conclusion, it looks highly likely that it won’t be the alleged file-sharers that are “held to account”, but the lawyers who are speculatively invoicing seemingly innocent people without just cause.

Astonishingly, it appears not even a legal expert from an anti-file-sharing body has a good grasp of what’s actually going on here, leaving FAST so eager to jump in against illegal file-sharing that it’s missed the entire lesson of the ACS Law debacle: that this country needs clear, sensible anti-piracy laws, and until then, abuses of power against innocent people and wastes of court time such as the ACS mess will continue to happen.

And that helps no-one, on either side of the piracy debate.

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks confused (you may be surprised to find that’s not my default setting). Let me explain the situation, and hopefully you can help sort things out.

Earlier this month, the editor of an American magazine called Cooks Source earned the full force of the web’s fury by not only stealing a writer’s article – “A Tale of Two Tarts,” about the non-American origins of apple pie, complete with medieval recipes – but by defending her move with this clearly ridiculous line: “The web is considered ‘public domain’ and you should be happy we just didn’t ‘lift’ your whole article and put someone else’s name on it.”

The day the story broke, Twitter, Facebook and my inbox were filled with people sharing the story and abusing the editor’s lack of sense and knowledge of copyright law. What an idiot, the general tone was, to think that just because something’s available online in digital form that you can just take it without paying the creator.

Shortly afterwards, I bought a Kindle and asked friends for book recommendations. Not only did I receive suggestions of beloved titles and favourite authors, but directions to torrents to get them for “free” – this advice from some of the very same people lambasting (the apparently now defunct) Cooks Source.

So why the double standard? Why do so many consider it perfectly okay to download illegal copies of books, albums and movies, but destroy the career of an editor who does the very same with an article? Why do they mock a woman for treating easily-available digital content as free, when they themselves do it all the time?

I’m not defending Cooks Source – as a journalist, I consider the editor’s ignorance and attitude appalling – but why was the rights holder the hero in this case, and the exact opposite in others?

The editor’s indignant tone certainly added fuel to the fire – her latest message (which suggests she types content straight from books) doesn’t help. Cooks Source also stood to make/save money by pilfering the pie article, and while that’s not much different from saving a fiver on an eBook or a tenner on an album, the issue surrounds business and not pleasure.

But that hardly seems enough to unleash the righteous wave of angry mockery that came down on Cooks Source. I can’t figure it out, so over to you: any thoughts on why piracy has such a double standard? Why is it cool to download entertainment but not to filch pie stories?

Alongside systems such as Spotify and Last.FM, FlowMusic is hoping to encourage listeners to keep it legal by making it as easy as possible to buy tracks – which I’d say is the right tactic to discouraging music piracy. Make it easy, keep it cheap.

However, there’s one area constantly throwing a wrench in the works: sorting out the rights.

At the FlowMusic launch, Pure’s CEO Hossein Yassaie shared a slide showing the complicated mess his company had to decipher when it came to paying out royalties to the various parties involved. He said this one slide took three hours to be explained to him. (Click image to enlarge.)

“I didn’t believe it at first… being an intellectual property company we understand licensing,” he said. “But I have to say I have never seen anything as complicated at this.”

And if that doesn’t make your eyes bleed and your mind start to leak, it’s worth noting that’s the dumbed-down, simplified version. As Yassaie said: “There were times along the way I almost gave up.”

Despite clearly trying — and getting PRS for Music onside — Pure couldn’t sort out all of the rights issues before launch, with debate remaining over who gets paid for streaming songs. Director of connected services Pete Downton said: “This is new ground in the industry… we’re trying to find a model that works for everyone. If we wait for the copyright legislation written in 1709 to be amended to reflect the reality of technology today, we’ll be waiting a long time to launch these services, but we start from a fundamental position that we respect copyright.”

And there’s the problem. Even if a company can figure out the tech side and come up with an appealing commercial idea, sorting out the licensing can knock the whole thing down. Ever notice how songs in your Spotify playlists quietly get greyed out and won’t play? That’s over rights issues.

The musicians, songwriters, and yes, even marketeers in the music industry deserve to get paid for their work. But somehow rights need to be simplified or the industry risks causing those music companies trying to encourage legal downloads – such as Pure – to give up and leave music distribution to the pirates.

The question is how long it’s going to last. More than one voice in the babbling din of the internet has openly wondered how the likes of Spotify can ever hope to turn a profit, and for good reason. The vast server farms, all that bandwidth swallowed by hungry cheapskates – not to mention having to pay all those pesky musicians – it must cost an absolute fortune.

And I really do wonder where all the money is coming from, because Spotify’s advertising is  clearly about as effective as getting semi-conscious students to thrust leaflets into the path of psychotic rush-hour commuters. The phrase ‘doomed to failure’ springs to mind.

Okay, okay. The number of people signed up for the £10 a month Premium service must be, at least, into double figures by now, all lured by the promise of high-quality 320Kbits/sec music and the removal of all those ads, but I’m willing to bet that most are still perfectly happy to put up with listening to the same Crucial memory advert 48 times a day in exchange for free music. Would Sir care for a free lunch, or would he care to pay for a very slightly nicer one? The answer isn’t blowing in the wind, it’s scrawled in big red letters on a placard waving right in front of your face.

So, where does this leave the musicians, the life blood of Spotify? Well, to put it in Spotify’s own, cuddly prose:

“We respect creativity and believe in fairly compensating artists for their work. We’ve cleared the rights to use the music you’ll listen to in Spotify.”

Ah, great. Well, that’s my conscience salved. All those ‘fairly compensated” artists are probably off sniffing up their profits on a 300ft yacht moored somewhere off the coast of Barbados. Hurrah for Spotify, saviour of music.

Back in the real world, it seems the artists earnings aren’t in such great shape. Indeed,  going by the postings of one Norwegian artist, Stein Tore, over at Gearslutz.com, the haunt of musicians and producers worldwide, Spotify’s definition of fair compensation is debatable:

“I have some minor releases available on both Spotify and iTunes. Here are the numbers for a given period, you decide what is best. BTW, I’m both the artist and record company, so there is no-one besides my digital distributor who gets a cut before I do.

Spotify: 1,793 plays = approx $1

iTunes: 2 complete albums, 14 individual songs: $21″

You read that right. Nearly 2,000 plays of a track on Spotify earn the artist around a dollar. Yes, a whole dollar. Going by the fact that even Coldplay’s Myspace page racks up little more than 8,000 plays per day, then my sub-GCSE maths tells me they’d, ooh, barely make $1,400  a year. Just think, after a year, Chris would have just enough to buy Gwyneth a couple of pairs of designer shoes and an extra large bag of lentils. Thank you, Spotify.

Guerilla advertising

Lady Gaga is another artist who, on the face of it, seems equally unlikely to be sending a Christmas card Spotify’s way. Spotify’s guerilla advertising regularly interrupted my favourite albums to herald the release of her track, Poker Face, and up to that point I hadn’t the faintest idea who she was. But months later, and despite the successful marketing campaign leading to over a million plays of said hit track, Spotify allegedly sent her a cheque for around $167.

There’s a fatal flaw in this line of thinking, however, and that’s because Spotify is essentially radio evolved. Artists aren’t ever going to turn a profit from radio play alone, but it’s more than worth it for the valuable advertising it provides. Lady Gaga is a good example. A no-name wannabe one minute, and adorning the charts worldwide the next – services such as Spotify serve a useful purpose for big labels wishing to push their latest cash cow into the limelight.

But while the big labels don’t seem too bothered – after all, any publicity is good publicity – the smaller record labels and bands are seemingly abandoning Spotify, mere months after uploading their catalogue of releases. Indeed, for the last couple of months or so, the PC Pro labs have been vibrating to the tune of Burial, Zomby, Kode 9, Flying Lotus and a whole host of others thanks to the presence of Hyperdub, a small but beautifully formed London-based record label. As of a couple of weeks ago, the Labs lay silent. Hyperdub had, presumably, withdrawn its entire catalogue.

Marcus Scott of Hyperdub told a different story however:

“We asked not to go on Spotify but we got put on there anyway. It took ages for us to get the music off… Spotify isn’t something we want to be part of, and the idea that new is better is a fallacy really, we prefer autonomy to pointless overexposure.”

It isn’t just smaller labels who’ve found themselves consumed by Spotify either. Robert Fripp, guitarist with the cult band King Crimson gave a withering rebuttal to Spotify’s claims of legitimacy:

“Spotify put up KC music without asking us; ie without clearing the rights (and later withdrawn). Spotify has yet to explain to us who gave them rights in the first place (this is simple for us as I own / control all of them); or why it assumed it might have had rights.”

In a statement sent to PC Pro, Spotify said:

“We ensure that all music on Spotify is licensed via labels, aggregators and publishers who guarantee that they have the rights to the content. In an age of piracy where music is available illegally online, all music on Spotify is legitimately and legally obtained and made available to users. With regards payments made to artists through the various rights holders (labels, aggregators, publishers), we aren’t able to comment on confidential agreements.”

Long-term future?

It’s not that I personally don’t want Spotify to endure, I do. Its survival is very much in my interests as a consumer, and particularly as an avid consumer of all things free. But although Spotify has been lauded as combating piracy and steering those evil file-sharers onto the straight and narrow, I can’t help feeling that Spotify’s intentions aren’t entirely altruistic.

The glaring issue is that the Big Four have a vested interest in Spotify’ success. For reportedly measly sums, Sony BMG, Universal Music, Warner Music and EMI bought themselves a 5.8%, 4.8%, 3.8% and a  1.9% stake in the streaming service. No-one knows what the terms of the deal between Spotify and the Big Four actually is, but it’s reasonable to assume that reduced or non-existent royalty rates are probably part of it.

Crippling Spotify with obscene royalty payments might be the last thing on their mind, but it’s a dormant threat nonetheless. Should the music companies finally decide that Spotify isn’t the future of online music, they could beat it to death with a frighteningly large royalty stick in next to no time at all.

And while the music industry objects to the idea that piracy boosts  music sales, its collusion with Spotify seems to covertly admit as much. After all, what could be better than something that offers most of the benefits of piracy – free music – and takes away the downsides – having to faff with frequently virus-laden torrents which take anything from minutes to days to complete?

Spotify seems a prime candidate to fill the void left by quitting the high seas of piracy: easy, instant access to the music you want, for free, and with all the music you want, not just those which are popular enough to be uploaded.

I know that, for my sins, I haven’t illegally downloaded a single track since Spotify was released. I’ve bought a handful of CDs, downloaded the odd album  in lossless FLAC format from Bleep.com, and lovingly assembled a sizable pile of bizarre, eosteric charity shop vinyl, but the thought of stealing music just hasn’t crossed my mind. And perhaps that’s the point. The music industry was never opposed to the idea of trying before you buy, but it simply wanted to wrest control from the pirates. Now, with Spotify’s user base reaching into the millions, maybe it’s got its wish.

Which is handy, because the dear old BSA would like nothing more than for employees to shaft their bosses in the run-up to Christmas, launching as it has “an advertising and marketing campaign to encourage employees in London to report their companies if they think they are using illegal software.”

Is it me, or is there something deeply unsavoury about the BSA trying to claim the moral high-ground on the use of illegal software on the one hand, and then using Christmas and the recession as bait to encourage employees to grass up their bosses on the other?

It’s even more galling when Microsoft – a BSA member and one of its biggest cheerleaders – stubbornly refuses to bend when businesses complain that its licenses are so complicated they’d give Stephen Hawking a migraine. When business leaders pleaded with Steve Ballmer to simplify Microsoft’s licenses at an event in London earlier this autumn, the Microsoft boss merely laughed it off, saying: “I don’t anticipate a big round of simplifying our licences. Every time you simplify something you get rid of something.” Yes, Steve. It’s called complexity.

One of the business owners who challenged Ballmer complained that he felt Microsoft’s licensing terms were “trying to trip people up”. When the Microsoft-sponsored BSA makes such a blatant attempt to turn employees against their own companies, I can see his point.

Merry Christmas everyone.

I don’t exactly resent all this product validation stuff. I’d prefer it if Microsoft didn’t feel the need to do it; but I accept that the company has a legitimate interest in dissuading casual copying, and to me a one-time online authorisation doesn’t seem an unreasonable way of going about that.

But I do resent all the weasel words and spin that surround the process.

A dubious history

I mean, let’s go back to the start. When online authorisation was introduced with Windows XP, Microsoft described it as “product activation” – a name that made it sound like a trivial necessity. Of course, that was (to put it kindly) a euphemism: how is a fresh installation of XP “inactive”?

Then in 2005 the company started talking about “genuine” Windows, and contrasting it with “counterfeit” software. Er, what? Is there a sweatshop in China somewhere where programmers are churning out knock-off DLLs and shonky service packs?

Of course not. The passing off of fake goods is a real problem in the Far East, but so far as I’m aware it’s not a major concern in the English-speaking territories at which this rhetoric is aimed. The focus on counterfeiting looks rather more like an attempt to discredit unlicensed software with a term that suggests it’s of inferior quality.

In reality, of course, the difference between “genuine” and “counterfeit” software is often nothing more than a 25-character code.

An advantage you can’t refuse

To promote its new notion of “genuine” software, the company also started touting the “Windows Genuine Advantage” – another heavily nuanced term. The “advantage” here was that if you allowed Microsoft to verify your Windows licence you wouldn’t be punished.

But if your installation wasn’t validated as “genuine”, your access to OS updates was restricted. And if Microsoft considered that your product key had been used too many times, it installed software on your machine that would nag you to buy a new licence.

And the best bit is that, after hobbling your Windows installation in this way, WGA then sympathetically explained that perhaps you had been “a victim of software counterfeiting”.

Of course, if you’re using Windows without a licence you have no right to expect a full Windows Update service. And arguably you’ve no right to complain when the developer modifies the code in unhelpful ways. Like I say, it’s not Microsoft’s anti-piracy measures I object to: it’s the slimy way they try to dress them up as somehow for our benefit that sticks in the throat.

Don’t believe what you read in the papers

WGA and “product activation” were developed further in Vista, and at the same time Microsoft stepped up its spin campaign, putting out three reports bewailing the dangers of unlicensed software.

The most credible was the first, a 2006 IDC report entitled The Risks of Obtaining and Using Pirated Software (PDF). This study found that “obtaining and using pirated software can pose a serious security risk.” That’s true, so far as it goes – though the danger identified by the researchers came from malware hosted on warez sites, not from the pirated software itself.

The other two reports were less persuasive. Last October’s Harrison Group report, Impact of Unlicensed Software on Mid-Market Companies (PDF), claimed to show that unlicensed software caused “poor business performance”; but as I noted at the time, its methodology was fundamentally flawed.

And then, in March, came Microsoft’s own anti-piracy paper, The Surprising Risks of Counterfeit in Business (PDF). Despite the title, there was nothing surprising in this paper: it effectively just parrotted the (questionable) findings of its predecessors.

But that’s all right: simply by keeping up a steady flow of such papers, the company is establishing a body of published research that seems to support the idea that unlicensed software is inherently dangerous and unreliable.

Moving with the times

In the meantime, the team that actually develops Windows has undergone a significant philosophical shift. The hubris of the Vista launch has given way to a fitting humility. Managers are acknowledging past mistakes, and making honest efforts to fix them. Windows 7’s improvements in responsiveness, usability and customisation suggest a new respect for the user.

And this change in tone is visible even in its anti-piracy technologies: “reduced functionality mode” isn’t coming back, and there’s no longer a forced delay in logging on to a system that’s out of its activation “grace period”.

In the glow of this optimistic new dawn, last week’s announcement was only the more aggravating.

For while Joe Williams, general manager for “Genuine Windows”, confirmed the new, less intrusive anti-piracy measures in Windows 7, he also made clear that the party line on piracy hasn’t evolved at all. Here again was “genuine high-quality Microsoft product”; here again was “malicious code” supposedly lurking within “counterfeit software.” Here, again, the constant empty reassurance that all this hoopla is really for our benefit.

Within the software too, the high priests of WGA cling to their dogma. In Windows 7, if you don’t “activate” your OS within Microsoft’s stipulated timeframe, it brings up this warning:

Really, you have to wonder how many people are won over by all this slanted rhetoric and how many (like me) are insulted by it. Hell, I’d be far happier giving my money to Microsoft if it didn’t feel so much like caving in to manipulation.

It’s high time the “Genuine Windows” boys took a lesson from the Windows developers… and start playing straight with us.

If you enjoy getting angry at disingenuous rhetoric, may I also recommend Microsoft’s WGA Blog, penned by Microsoft product manager Alex Kochis? The reader comments can be particularly entertaining.

Among the drive’s long list of features is the ability to run BitTorrent downloads in the background. This is great news for anyone who currently leaves their PC running overnight. But before you do, the manual has the following warning:

“Warning: Please be warned against illegal downloading of copyrighted materials. The Download Station functionality is provided for downloading authorized files only. Downloading or distribution of unauthorized materials may result in severe civil and criminal penalty. Users are subject to the restrictions of the copyright laws and should accept all the consequences.”

All well and good, of course. We wouldn’t want people illegally downloading content, and no sane hardware manufacturer would condone it in a manual. Except that QNAP has used the following screengrab:

This suggests two things: firstly, someone at QNAP has a much more realistic idea of what people are going to do with their products than the text of their manuals suggests. And secondly, that person has horrible, horrible taste in films.

Because the fact is that BitTorrent is only gaining momentum. A huge number of people now get their music this way (and see nothing wrong with it, as noted by Tim Danton in another recent blog post). As I write this, one popular BitTorrent tracker is reporting over 21 million users currently uploading or downloading data. A recent study by Jupiter Research estimates that a fifth of Europeans actively use file sharing sites – twice as many as use the iTunes store.

Clearly this is a problem. When such a large segment of society is at odds with the law, something needs to change. But what? Do we need to rethink the law, or do we just need to work harder to stop people sharing music and video files?

Before we can answer that, I think we need to understand what we’re actually trying to achieve. I believe the presumption should be that people are free to do what they want on the internet (and elsewhere) so long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. So the first question is: what precisely is the harm that’s done by file sharing? Why, in a nutshell, do we care about all these people sending music files back and forth between their computers?

I’ll return to this subject in my next blog post; but before I do I’d be interested to hear your views on the above questions. So please, comment below and let me know what you see as the problem with file sharing.

Amazon’s new MP3 store has finally been launched without DRM, with decent 256kbps tracks and some initial prices that certainly catch the eye (although not Tim’s). All good stuff, if a bit late to the party – but one mischievously timed little add-on could have a much greater impact on the industry.

It’s a Firefox plug-in that’s freely available if you know where to look (I won’t be telling you), that essentially turns the official Amazon.com retail site into a candy shop for freeloaders. You’ll see from the screengrab above that a little – ok, huge – extra button appears on every item page, telling you in no uncertain terms that you don’t really have to be spending your hard-earned cash on that round, shiny thing that spins round and makes noise come out of a stereo.

Click on “Download 4 free” and your BitTorrent client will fire up, show you which songs you’ve chosen, and whizz them all from someone else’s hard disk to yours in seconds. No trawling torrent portals, no searching through warez sites, just a nice, fat torrent on a plate. And the cherry on top is that the Amazon site will innocently recommend artists to you as usual to help you make up your mind what to go for… until you just grab the whole lot and scarper. Maniacal laughing optional.

Admittedly it’ll mainly be used by the same people who already get all their music from BitTorrent, but it makes it so easy that there’s a danger it’s simple enough that it could attract those who only don’t do it because they don’t know how.

It’s not the first exploit of its kind – there’s been one that links to torrents directly from IMDB, another that hacks the Amazon “search inside” function to download free books – but this is the most outrageous and ballsy I’ve yet seen, and just adds to the feeling Tim spoke about in his blog, that for a certain generation today, illegal downloads are seen as perfectly legit.

We’ve no doubt the lawyers are on the case already, (the makers do warn you that you may be about to violate copyright laws, which is noble of them; they also call it an artistic project that “addresses the topic of current media distribution models vs. current culture and technical possibilities.” How very Banksy.) But as these torrent portals and networks have proven notoriously difficult to stop, it’s hard to see what sites like Amazon can do in the long run.

Scrapping DRM for its store was an admission of sorts that it simply can’t prevent piracy in that way, but while we’re all sitting here applauding them for doing the decent thing, the pirates are already another three steps ahead.

It’s not the only torrent portal on the list, either, with Mininova sitting pretty at number 52. That’s higher than whole host of hugely popular and well-respected sites – about.com, for instance, languishes at number 78, and popular bohemian hangout DeviantArt lurks at 77. Blogging behemoth LiveJournal is just behind, too, at 56.

All this is evidence that the pirating of illegal files – be it games, movies, music or software – is a huge business. If it were legitimate, it’d probably be discussed as a burgeoning industry worth investing in. And, with the much-vaunted credit crunch upon us, people acquiring their favourite games, albums and movies from less-than-legal sources is, surely, going to rise. Couple a lack of disposable income with the proliferation of unlimited broadband deals and, surely, piracy will get worse.

And, yet, what can be done about it? The popularity seems to be akin to a bloke in the local pub offering around some dodgy merchandise he’s ‘acquired’ – a bit like Twiggy in The Royle Family – but on a much larger scale. Schemes have already been trialled: Starforce was meant to stop games being copied, but just infuriated hordes of gamers, who probably ran straight to The Pirate Bay to find a healthily-seeded torrent of Call of Duty 4. Crytek, developers of Crysis, our 3D benchmark game of choice, has already announced that future titles will be console-centric, such is the cost to their company of piracy.

Steam, surely, is the way it should be done. It’s been adopted by thousands of gamers and provides a simple way for people to buy and download games. The massive increase in the number of users and games available suggests that they’re doing something right.

And, yet, the piracy continues – it seems that experienced internet users believe that they should be getting everything for nothing these days. Another school of thought suggests that people ‘try before they buy’, and download a game, or an album, before shelling out for a physical copy if they’re suitably impressed. Undoubtedly, though, plenty of people are helping themselves to whatever they want with little fear of repercussions – as with the bloke in the pub with a bag of dodgy jeans, there’s little that can be done to stop it.

It’s an odd conundrum, and one that’s cost more than just lost sales: jobs, homes, cars and companies have, no doubt, been lost as a result of more people pilfering things for free than paying full price. It’s certainly an issue, and one that hasn’t been solved yet. So, what do you think? Are you an avid, rum-drinking pirate of the cyber-seas, or do you make a point of paying full price for software, CDs and movies that you think are worth it?

And how would you put a stop to such a destructive practise?