I hate to bring up the subject of home copying yet again but I feel that everyone is neglecting one of the most important factors which contributes to piracy.
C Hamilton's letter (issue 73) states: "People copy software because they don't want to pay for it, not because they can't." Although this may be true to some extent, I believe that there are those who genuinely cannot afford it. A large proportion of the games buying market consists of children under the age of fifteen whose only source of income is pocket-money and to whom £2 is not a small amount of money.
Children are not going to spend what could be a whole week's pocket money on a single game when they can buy a C90 cassette for under a pound and copy their friends' games. This is especially true of games costing about £15.
The only way to stop this piracy therefore are:
the dongle method of protection, or
to make the game so bad that people will not want to copy it.
On the subject of software companies, I feel that some of them are very hypocritical - they copy the ideas behind successful arcade or computer games and then sell them, which is itself piracy. Microdeal for example are on a crusade against piracy yet they sold a game which looks very much like Pitfall.
Original ideas are few and far between and as soon as a successful game is developed the software companies produce their own clones. Everybody complains about the number of Manic Miner copies, forgetting that the original was Miner 2049er.
Before the software companies complain how home copying is damaging the industry they should stop their own large scale piracy.
1st September 1984
