Opinion: Arrrgghh! They are always complaining about software pirates

And this time they’re calling on the governments of the world to help stamp out this victimless crime. Yeah, let’s get a UN Security Council resolution up so we can invade any country that harbours software pirates. Gotta be right up there with the terrorists as a major threat to our freedoms and way of life. Puhlease. Gimme a break!

Nintendo claims it lost nearly $1bn in sales because of piracy last year. How do they know that? If they really know exactly how many copies were pirated why didn’t they call the cops instead of just standing there counting the counterfeit? And are we really expected to believe that everyone who buys a pirated game or video or program would have bought it at full price if they couldn’t get it from the people with parrot epoulettes?

About the only winners from clamping down hard on pirate copies of Microsoft Office would be all the freebie open source clones of Word and Excel and Powerpoint. And maybe all the end-users. Less bugs – or so we’re told.

OK, so maybe there aren’t that many open source kick-ass games to replace the copyrighted versions, but charging $100 for a game should rank as outright piracy in the first place. So it’s only a question of which pirate you’re prepared to support – the corporate ones with suits and six-figure salaries or the dodgy ones with flip-flops and thousands of websites.

Hey, at least they’re using bandwidth so somebody is making a buck here. Maybe Nintendo and their pals should just open their own ISP and get a slice of the action. That’s probably all the revenue they’d really be missing out on, and probably a tad more than a lot of their lame games are worth anyway.