ARE YOU A CROOK? Dec. 12, 1988

(Start Italics)

 The doorbell rang at 8 pm; it was a good friend.  He invited his friend in and
showed him the latest in a series of Fantasy role-playing games from a major
game publisher; he'd bought it that day for $49.

 "Wow, that looks great!" said the friend.

 "No problem," said the host. "I'll run you off a copy to take home with you
before you leave."

(End Italics)

 A hidden group exists in the USA today; it's language is bizarre and arcane,
it's members secretive.  They are engaged in an illegal activity.  They are
game software pirates, and their reach extends to every corner of this
country, for just about every owner of a home computer does it.

 "Casual piracy" may be costing the game industry as much as $50 million
dollars or more a year in lost sales, yet there seems to be no way to stop
it without totally redefining just what "software piracy" really is, or so
totally copy protecting game disks that you'll never be able to put a game
on your hard drive again.

 If you've ever made a copy of a game for a friend and given it to him, you're
a casual pirate.  If you've ever received a copy of game from a friend, you're
a casual pirate.  If you've ever made a copy of a game, then sold it, the FBI
would like to speak with you.

"ROUND UP THE USUAL SUSPECTS..."

(Start Italics)
 The call came at the usual time, 8 pm; the SysOp left the terminal, where he
was updating download files on his BBS, and picked up the receiver.

 "It's me," the voice on the other end said. "I've got the latest cracked
version of that RPG we talked about last week."

 "Great!" the SysOp replied. "That must be a new record for you; it's only been
out for 2 days."

 "I didn't have to crack this one," the other said. "It's a Beta Test version;
I bought it at a swap meet in San Francisco for ten dollars."

 The SysOp laughed.  "That's excellent! Ok, you upload the RPG, and I'll give
you access to war games library. Someone just cracked the newest Midway game
and uploaded it there."

(End Italics)

 The tools of the software pirate are few; a home computer, a copying program
and a spare disk. With these, even a novice computer owner can copy today's
most expensive game programs and give a copy to a friend.

 The other side of that coin is the "professional," the knowledgeable computer
user who, with the aid of some specialized programming utilities, can "crack"
the copy protection on a game in days, sometimes hours.  When he's done, he
can upload the unprotected disk to any compatible computer with a modem.
Suddenly, a game that might cost $50 retail is being acquired for little or no
money by dozens or, sometimes, hundreds of computer owners.

 It isn't "big business," in the sense that pirates are making a profit; the
"casual" pirate never charges his friends for a copy of a new game, and very
few "pro" pirates sell the software they crack.  Almost all, though, put their
pseudonyms, or "handle," on the title screen of every piece of software they
de-protect.  They gain stature in the closed community of "crackers;" their
friends and associates gain hundreds of dollars of software at no cost.

 However, even casual piracy effects the end consumer; hundreds of thousands,
perhaps millions, of dollars in sales are lost to publishers each year due to
piracy, casual or otherwise.  Money that could have gone to producing more or
better games never comes in.  As well, publishers price their products by how
many copies they expect to sell; if everybody who owned a copy of, for
example, Chuck Yeager's Flight Simulator, one of the most popular programs
around, had bought that game off the shelf, it might cost half of what it
retails for today.

 When I started this article, I figured I'd have about one hundred comments
from publishers on the evils of software piracy, and no comments from
professional pirates; I've never been more wrong.

 Many people at the major game software publishers were willing only to make a
grudging comment on the current state of software piracy, IF their name wasn't
used or the name of the company they work for referred to.  Mostly, they just
didn't want to talk about it, or weren't authorized to give out information on
the subject.  The exceptions were Mediagenics/Activision and Garde/Games of
Excellence.

 On the other hand, the software pirates and the System Operators (SysOps) who
run pirate computer Bulliten Board Systems (BBS), wouldn't shut up.  I had to
convince one of them NOT to reveal his true name; the chance of going to jail
just didn't seem to deter him at all.  Considering the laxity of software
theft laws in most states, I could hardly blame him.

 The real shocker was the attitude of some of my friends and associates; they
all work in the computer industry, they all know piracy is wrong, and yet each
and every one of them had at least one piece of commercial software that they
hadn't paid for.

BACKGROUND: THE HACKER ETHIC

 Piracy is a term coined in the late Seventies, defined as "illegally
disseminating software or software products copyrighted by another individual
or organization."  In it's baldest definition, piracy is the theft of a game
or other software, most often by a private individual.  This person will then
give or sell the program to others, depriving the designer and publisher of
the price of the program.

 "Casual" piracy, or individual acts of copying and distributing of software,
grew out the fabled "hacker" mentality, originally fostered at MIT in the late
1950's and early '60s, by a group of precocious student programmers working on
old batch processing machines.  These hackers would leave their tapes in a
drawer for anyone to use and improve on, the object being to get the best
program using the smallest number of computer command codes.  Sometimes dozens
of students would "hack" at the same program; he who developed the tightest
code was a true star, held in deep respect by other students.

 As these students graduated and moved out into the world and to other
universities, they took this "hacker ethic" with them.  It was seen as the
opportunity to fulfill a grand dream; a totally open society, with completely
free exchange of information via computers.  This attitude caught on among
home computer buffs in the mid- and late Seventies; groups like the famous
Home Brew Computer club in the San Francisco Bay Area were used to a totally
free exchange of ideas, discoveries and theories among themselves and other
clubs, and this helped spark the computer revolution in 1978 and 1979.  The
two "Steves," Jobs and Wozniak of Apple Computer fame, were members of the
Home Brew organization.

 The hacker ethic didn't start eroding until software and hardware designers
realized how much money there was to be made in the home computer industry;
suddenly, the words "public domain" became verboten, and the pioneers rushed
to get copyrights and patents registered.

 What was left after this shakeout was a small group of people who still clung
to the hacker ethic of free information, freely distributed.  Their passion
has seen its own explosion, in the form of privately owned and operated
computer BBSs.  Using a computer and a device called a "modem" (short for
modulator/demodulator), anyone can use the telephone lines to called a
similarly equipped computer and exchange text files and programs.
 Hard-core computer users can purchase or obtain from the public domain a
program that allows them to receive calls from other computers and let them
exchange information via specific message boards; think of it as the
neighborhood bulliten board, tacked up on a Safeway wall, only these
"shoppers" are browsing through the phone lines.  Incoming callers can read
messages left by other callers, post their own messages, send "electronic
mail" and send and receive software programs.  This has created an entire
underculture of information junkies.

 This isn't just a localized phenomenon; there are now more free BBSs in the
United States than newspapers, television stations and radio stations
combined; some estimates place the number of BBSs as high as 40,000.  Most
likely, there are around 11,000 BBSs operating at any one time (they have a
tendency to come and go, as SysOps discover that running a BBS takes more time
than they are willing to spend).  Many BBSs publish a list of BBS contact
numbers, such as the PAMS List, which contains over 2,000 up-to-date BBS
telephone numbers.

 Some chose to take an originally noble idea and twist it; no matter the
excuses, piracy is theft, pure and simple.  It does not seem to stop the
thieves, however.

BACKGROUND: COPY PROTECTION

 Copy protection has many forms, but comes in two main flavors: Disk Protection
and Manual Keyword.

 Until just recently, almost all computer games were copy protected with a disk-

based system; the most common is called "check-sum."  This is a routine
embedded in the game that causes the computer to check various figures, add
them up, and then continue with the game, if all is well.  By leaving at least
one track on a floppy disk unused, the routine knows what the figures should
add up to at all times.  Copying a disk, however, generally causes all tracks
to be used, so a copied "check-sum" protected game would always come up with
the wrong sum, and stop the game.

 The problem with this form of copy protection is that it's easy to circumvent.
One commercial disk copy program, Copy II Plus, even provides parameter files
for most games and other software packages, although they post notices through
the program that these are for "backup" purposes only ("Backing up" a disk
means to copy it; most computer users prefer to backup the original, store it,
then use the copy).

 Using Copy II Plus, a novice computer user can guide himself, by using the
manual, in copying dozens of commercial software products.  A game that may
have taken 8 months to program, test, debug and get on the shelves takes about
4 minutes to copy on a home computer.

 Manual Keyword copy protection is a system that, at certain points in the
game, demands that the player look up a certain word in the game manual and
enter it on the keyboard.  If he can't, the game stops.  This type of copy
protection is much preferred by consumers, as it allows a game to be stored on
a hard disk, where its more easily and quickly accessed.  By creating very
large manuals, sometimes 200 pages, the publisher can make it expensive to
copy the whole manual and so deters the casual gamer from giving a copy to a
friend.

 The whole point behind copy protection, designers and publishers say, is to
protect a large investment, in time and talent by the designers, and in money
by the publishers.  Ralph Bosson, of Garde Games and designer of such hits as
Blue Powder, Gray Smoke and High Seas, makes the point that good copy
protection does what it's supposed to do--keep honest people honest.

 "We put out High Seas without protection," Bosson told me, "and the sales just
dropped out."  While there are other factors--some games are just more popular
than others--the clear inference is that copy protection helps prevent piracy.

PIRACY: MOTIVATIONS

 "I first started cracking programs in 1980 because a disk died," says "Captain
Crackers."  "I'd bought this $250 check writing program, 'cause my wife and I
thought we needed one.  The disk was heavily protected, so I had to use the
original.  Eventually, the disk went bad... and there I was, stuck.  I had no
choice but to send the disk back to the manufacturer for a new disk.  They
charged me $20 for the disk and took two weeks to ship it."

 Over the telephone, I heard a snort of utter disgust.  "In the meantime, all
our bills were on the computer, and we were two week late paying them.
 THAT made me mad, and that's went I started looking into how to duplicate
disks."

 Captain Crackers (he no longer cracks software, but prefers to remain unnamed)
makes a valid point on the genesis of software piracy; software publishers
helped start the trend of piracy and software cracking by charging exorbitant
prices and not providing backup disks to their protected programs.

 "The companies walked into it face first," he told me, "by trying to gouge the
user.  They not only didn't have the best interests of their customers at
heart, they were charging incredible prices for disks that the user couldn't
back up.  Who's going to pay $300 for Visi-Calc if they can get it for free?"
He noted that he originally bought Visi-Calc for $250, then it saw it on store
shelves for $20 two years later.  "You think I didn't feel like I was ripped
off?" he asked wryly.

 "If the companies had first approached the market with an attitude of 'The
buyer is honest, let's trust the buyer and provide a good service for him,'
they would have made thousands of converts and the piracy issue today would be
moot," Crackers continued.  "As it was, they came at the consumer with a
'Let's squeeze every last penny we can from each buyer, as fast as we can and
when we can,' and that killed them."

 The Captain points to the phenomenon of "shareware" to illustrate his point
(shareware is software that is put into the public domain by the designer, who
asks that a contribution be sent to him if a person uses and likes the
program).  "There are some people who are making a living on shareware alone,"
he notes. "People may not send the full asking price, but many send something,
even a few dollars.  It shows that it can work."

 It seems certain that both the consumer and the publisher, at least initially,
were at fault for the explosion of casual piracy.  While Crackers in no way
endorses piracy, it's easy to see how the attitude can be acquired.  These
days, passing a copy of a new disk to a friend or relative has become so
commonplace, no one even thinks of it as stealing anymore.

THE "CASUAL" PIRATE: UNTHINKING THEFT

 "One of the problems is the term 'piracy,' Ralph Bosson, game designer, told
me.  "It glorifies the act of stealing."

 Its true; the word piracy brings up exciting visions of Bluebeard and high-
masted frigates, scanning up and down the Spanish Main for merchantmen loaded
with loot.  It is a truly folklorish picture; most people never stop to
realize that pirates stole what they got.

 "People who wouldn't take a candy bar out of a drug store think nothing of
it," Bosson said, referring to the casual pirate.  "People have to be
reeducated; kids see their teachers and friends do it, their parents don't say
anything about it... they grow up thinking its ok.  Not right, just ok.  We
need to redefine the act of "piracy," and put the guilt back into it."

 Tony Van, in Technical Support for Mediagenics, agrees.  "Personally," he
says, "I feel most people just don't realize that its wrong, and it hurts the
market."  Bosson says it most hurts the consumer.  "If consumers bought the
games they normally get from a friend, we'd (software publishers) have more
money to put into research and development and, in turn, produce better
quality games." He sighed, "Can you imagine the great games that could be out
there now?

 The Software Publisher's Association, an industry organization that collects
data and also prosecutes software pirates, estimates conservatively that for
every piece of software sold, another is pirated.  That's a one to one ratio;
Ken Williams, founder of Sierra Online, theorizes a 10 to 1 ratio in Stephen
Levy's book, Hackers.  In an industry that saw over $300 million in sales last
year, the lost money becomes significant.

 Some say the estimates on the amount of piracy are overblown.  "I tend to
believe the industry highly overrates the amount of piracy that goes on," says
Captain Crackers.  "Frankly, they're just over-reacting."  Others, like Bosson
and Van, feel that a one-to-one ratio is probably conservative.

 What these people have to say goes to the core of casual piracy; making a copy
of a program and giving it to someone is, basically, a wrong act and yet, who
is going to deny a relative or close friend a copy of a game, especially if
they live in the same house or town?


BACKGROUND: THE PROFESSIONAL PIRATE (In Italics)

 He was working late; his boss at the game software publisher thought it
wonderful of him, but he had other motives.  Being a temporary employee had
it's good points, but pay wasn't one of them.

 By 7 pm, everyone else was gone from the office, hitting the Interstate for
San Francisco, San Jose or south to the depths of Silicon Valley; now was his
time.

 Stepping into the test lab, he used his key to open the cabinet that stored
beta test disks of the latest games in production at the company.  These games
were nearly finished, and scheduled to go to Duplication within the week.
Removing two disks, he stepped to a IBM compatible clone, switched it on and
booted a copy program.

 Once the two games were copied, he put the room back in it's original
condition and left, the disks in hand.  He knew he could sell them to the
right people for at least $200 a piece; he would never chance selling single
copies to gamers; let the SysOps take that risk.

(End Italics)

 Their numbers are few, and they trust almost no one, and especially not right
off the bat.  They cultivate their "professional" relationships very
carefully; court the wrong man, say an undercover cop, or a private
investigator for a publisher, and it could mean time in jail.  They either
operate or frequent the "pirate boards," computer BBSs that specialize in
providing "crunched" commercial software; this is the place they either sell
or acquire illegal copies of commercial games.

 These people are the "pros" in the piracy industry; not the home "cracker" who
seeks to impress his friends, but the person who illegally obtains a "cracked"
copy of a commercial product and sells it, either singly to consumers, or a
master copy to another "pro."  They represent fewer than one percent of
pirates, but they may deal as many as 10% of all pirated products.

 "I get most games before they are released in the US," one pirate, "Ajax,"
told me (Ajax is not his regular handle; he agreed to speak with me only in
strictest anonymity.  Even then, he had a voice distorter connected to the
phone.  I felt like I was part of a grade B spy thriller.).  Sometimes he gets
them from contacts Europe or Asia, where games are often released for sale
first; sometimes, he says, he buys unprotected copies from people he believes
work for publishers, or are in contact with employees of publishers.  "Where
else am I going to get a master copy of The Last Ninja?" he asked.  "A guy I
know contacts me on a local board and offers it to me for $500; of course I'm
going to buy it."

 It is infrequent for a "pro" to sell to a duplicator who has contacts with a
distributor, Ajax told me.  "When you read about illegal copies of games being
pulled off the shelf, that's the exception, not the rule," he said, noting
that most pros sell only single copies for $10 or $15 at local swap meets and
flea markets.  "I can make five or six hundred dollars on a weekend, and it's
virtually impossible to get caught."

 Most of his cracked software, over 90% of it, Ajax downloads from pirate
bulliten boards from around the country.  Operated independently by otherwise
honest SysOps, these BBSs are generally open to the calling public, except for
the valuable libraries where the cracked games are archived.  SysOps and their
close friends use such "hidden" libraries to pass cracked programs among
themselves, not intending for them to be made available to the general users.

 Taking as long as three months to cultivate a good relationship with the
pirate SysOp, gaining his trust by uploading one or two choice games, Ajax is
eventually granted access to "hidden" libraries where there can be as many as
100 cracked commercial games stored.  These he downloads, duplicates at home,
and sells at the above-mentioned flea markets and swap meets.

 The most distressing thought about pros, especially for designers, is the
constant rumors in the industry that beta test versions of games, versions
that aren't the final game, but close, are occasionally stolen right off a
publisher's property and sold to the highest bidder or uploaded to pirate
boards.

 Recently, a well-known author complained to a professional designer's
association that he logged onto a local BBS and found an early test version of
his latest game, the final version of which had just been released.  Since he
only shipped that copy to the publisher, and it was not distributed to
testers, it could only have been obtained from the publisher.

 The designer did not want his name published, and refused to divulge the name
of the publisher, saying only that it was "one of the big three publishers in
the US."

 These kind of unattributed and unconfirmed reports pop up all the time in the
industry; like heroic myth, there's probably a little bit of truth to them,
and a lot of exaggeration.  The incident reported above is definitely the
exception, not the rule, or publishing houses would be out of business in no
time.  Even the publishers will admit that it sometimes happens to them... as
long as you don't publish their names or their company's.

 It is impossible to say just how many copies of cracked games are downloaded
from these pirate boards, or sold illegally at flea markets; the point is that
these few people deal in bulk, as many as one hundred copies a day on a good
weekend.  And that's just more money out of the publisher's coffers.

WHAT MOTIVATES THE CASUAL PIRATE?

 If you ask a group of 100 frequent game buyers what they really want, 99 of
them will tell you the same thing, "I want to be able to put the damn game on
my hard drive and have a backup copy!"

 From the early days, when cracking a program was the only way to get a quick
backup disk to an expensive program, to the present, when casual piracy has
become an accepted action among honest people, the same ideal has held true;
"I paid for it, I'll make a backup if I want to!"  Honest people really do
seem to want to be honest; most will accept the concept of copy protection, as
long as it does not interfere with copying the product to a hard disk.

 Some publishers, like Mindscape and Strategic Simulations, are heeding this
clarion call from the users and producing games with strictly manual keyword
protection.  This allows the consumer to make a trouble free backup copy but,
unless a gamer has unlimited access to a Xerox machine, prevents the free
distribution of those copies.  Pure disk-based copy protection, of the sort
that prevents a gamer from copying a game to a hard drive, seems to be on the
way out.

THE FUTURE OF GAME PIRACY

 It seems unlikely that publishers and law enforcement agencies will be able to
significantly dent casual piracy in the near future.  To date, no software
publisher has made a point of prosecuting those accused of casual piracy,
mostly due to cost.  "The only time it now pays to sue," notes Ralph Bosson,
"is if the piracy is on a large scale and the pirate is taking payment."  If
large publishers did sue the casual pirate more often, Bosson feels, we might
see a change in the frequency of such theft. It seems a logical argument.

 Part of the problem may be in the legal definitions; passing a copy of a game
to a friend, but not accepting money for it, does not constitute theft on the
copier's part, but receiving stolen goods on the other end.  And that is far
harder to prove in court.  It's also costlier to prosecute.

 The SPA will take from between 10 and 40 cases of software piracy to court in
a year, and that does not even begin to address the problem.  We keep coming
back to Bosson's statement on reeducation, and making people realize that
casual piracy may be something everybody does, but that doesn't make right or
moral.

THE BOTTOM LINE

 The bottom line is: every copy of a game you hand out to a friend or relative
is helping to drive prices of ALL games up.  While software publishers don't
directly add in the estimated cost of piracy to a new game, they DO estimate
how many copies they expect to sell and price accordingly.  It's simple
mathematics; the more games you can sell, the less you have to charge.  One
representative of a publisher, off the record, estimated to me that piracy,
indirectly, may add $10 to the price of a new game.

 Casual piracy will never be eradicated, and some form of copy protection for
games will always be with us; it might be interesting for you to remember the
next time you give a friend a free copy of a new game, however, that you just
drove the price of the next new game up a penny or so.

SIDEBAR: JOHN DRAPER, THE LEGENDARY CAPTAIN CRUNCH

 If any one person can be said to personify the image of the software pirate,
its John Draper, also known as "Captain Crunch."  He was awarded his nickname
years ago, when he discovered that a tiny toy whistle, included as a free
prize in a box of breakfast cereal, emitted a tone that, when blown into a
telephone receiver, would unlock the trunk lines and allow unlimited long
distance dialing.

 Known for his intelligence, computer smarts, and eccentric mannerisms (he will
fly into a rage if someone lights a cigarette in his presence, and is rumored
not to have bathed for years, except in jail), Draper has been on the
forefront of computer technology since the early days.  At one point, as an
employee  for Apple Computers, he wrote Eazy Writer, one of the first, and
best-selling, word processors for the Apple II.  He is also constantly
embroiled with the law.  Several years ago, it is rumored in San Francisco, he
was caught selling forged BART rail transit passes; he'd discovered a way to
encode cards with the correct magnetic information and was selling $20 tickets
for $5, an act which got him several weeks in the local jail, or so the story
goes.

 His reputation, deserved or not, is huge in a society of computer geniuses
that includes such stellar names as the Woz, Bill Gates, Bill Budge and John
Dvorak, and gave rise to the definitive euphemisms for breaking a copy
protection scheme; "crunching" and/or "cracking a disk" are now standard terms
among computer users.  John Draper's place in computer epistemology is secure.

 I tried to reach Mr. Draper for an interview, as no article on computer
software would be complete without a comment from the inestimable Crunch;
unfortunately, I could not.  A notice in the Associated Press, however, notes
that he just returned for the Soviet Union, where he was part of an American
delegation consulting with Soviet computer scientists on telecommunications.
The legend of Captain Crunch has gone Internationale, and the Soviet Union may
never be the same.


Copyright 1988 by Richard D. Mulligan