This piece is almost suitable for Distorted View Daily in its sheer bizzareness. Okay, so it's not that bizarre, but these two are a prime example of why the human gene pool needs a good dose of chlorine.

An unemployed couple "working" full time as a games and music piracy outfit have been imprisoned for a combined total of 27 months.

What's more, it seems the piracy business left the couple a little strapped for cash, so they were fraudulently claiming benefit on top of their little piracy business.

Two crimes with one stone.

Upon searching the house, police and an ELSPA investigator found a secret cupboard containing an estimated £28,000 worth of games (if they were worth their retail value).

Begin Rant

Of course, ELSPA are terrible at maths and instantly convert this £28,000 of "potential" loss into £28,000 of "actual" loss, even though people buying pirate copies of games are unlikely to buy the real deal. Also, why they need an "ELSPA investigator" to track down people selling pirate copies of video games that a trained parrot could identify completely eludes me.

What really annoys me here is that these damned pirates were funding their business with honest taxpayers money- it's great to know our taxes are doing a world of good, eh?

While I don't condone piracy, I fail to see how the gaming industry in all it's crap-title-churning-vigor can complain about a few potential lost sales. Of course, theft is theft, and piracy is still illegal, but the huge ruckus over casual consumer piracy is starting to irritate me... actually, it's long past that point but you never heard that from me. All this scare mongering is getting absurd, and although I am on the side of the developers and publishers I wish they could find a quieter way to deal with their problems.

I get far too many piracy related news items, and I believe it's high time the police and the ELSPA dealt with these people quietly and left the general gaming public alone- after all, they've (I almost said we, there, ahem) been copying and downloading games for the past decade and beyond and the gaming industry still has enough free cash stuffed in their pockets to publish an unlimited supply of worthless drivel, pointless sequels and unoriginal clones. Sales reach into the hundreds of thousands, sometimes the millions, for gods sake!

The good ones amongst us still actively buy games, but they're not easy to afford in a society where we are being constantly marketed to and there is always something else more tangible available to buy. The cost of keeping up with todays technology is high, early adopters are continually shafted by high release prices, many games are over-hyped and don't deliver half of what we expect from them. In a world where everything costs, and almost everything costs a lot, many of us will pounce on the chance to get things for free. Sure, we know we're doing wrong but we simply don't have the money to play everything we want to play, watch everything we want to watch, listen to everything we want to hear and buy all the essentials of life. Piracy doesn't always equal lost sales, just increased exposure and more people enjoying titles they may never afford otherwise. It's high time the industry realised that there is only a finite amount of cash we can be milked for, and it is being shared between films, music, clothes, gadgets, trinkets, food, sweets and a million other things. If you're business is selling us things we don't need, can't afford, usually get dissapointed by and can fairly easily get free then it's high time your business model changed.

Now, about that quiter way? Piracy-orientated torrent sites should be continually targeted and taken down, piracy outfits should be arrested and dealt with quietly, and developers/publishers/hardware manufacturers should work together to cut costs, reduce prices and bring us alternate ways to purchase our games and better methods of locking them to individual consoles... I'm no expert, and these are only suggestions, but developers/publishers and hardware manufacturers need to get smarter, not tougher.

Of course, a near perfect business model exists that we almost always fail to take advantage of. We all need to stop buying, we all need to stop pirating, and we all need to start renting.

End Rant

Philip Howard