Pirates of the Pacific
by Jim Munroe
This past winter, Bruce and I took the trip out to Pacific Mall to get his PlayStation 2 modded. He was excited that he'd soon be able to play the pirated games he'd downloaded off the net, and I was excited about the amazing dim sum we'd be eating after. It was a pain getting to Kennedy and Steeles on transit in the snow, but had we waited till the spring Bruce would have been shit out of luck. The pirates have all now set sail.
Pacific Mall was as shiny and fabulous as I remembered, a piece of Hong Kong transplanted successfully into suburban Markham. We traipsed around to the various game stores, and Bruce would ask them questions about options and prices. They'd sometimes have price lists posted with different mod chips, preloaded packages and a catalogue of the bootleg games they had to offer.
After the third or fourth place offered the exact same price -- $130 for the mod chip installation with three games, $110 with no games -- Bruce started to grumble about honour among thieves. So he picked one that said they could do it in an hour, entrusting the two teenagers with the binder-sized console. The incongruity of the sleek tech coming out of his paint-flecked satchel gave it a spy-thriller feel.
I mentioned this as we sat down to lunch at Graceful Vegetarian Restaurant. "I think that's one of the reasons I like pirated games," Bruce said. "It's just more fun. Finding ways to get them rather than just going into a Wal-Mart -- it becomes a game in itself. Unlike movies or music, videogames have always been digital -- pirating games has been part of gaming culture from the beginning." He flipped over the menu. "Kind of expensive."
I assured him that once he tried the food his starving artist would be grateful. I called him on the fact that he was spending over a hundred bucks on a consumer purchase to avoid making consumer purchases.
"That's true," he said, "but once I saw the games available via bit torrent I decided it'd be worth it. I wouldn't have actually bought a PS2 at all if I couldn't get it modded -- retail games are out of my budget. I'm not going to quit painting and get a crap job so I can buy a new game every month."
We ordered, checking off a bunch of tasties, and I asked him what the mod chip actually does. "Most games are just DVDs, right? So you should be able to just copy them like you do CDs. But they've got these unreproducable bad blocks on the original that DVD copying software corrects, then when you put the copy in the PS2 console, it looks for these bad blocks, and when it can't find them it refuses to play. The mod chip bypasses this bad-block-checking step."
Our food arrived and we ignored bad blocks in favour of good bok choy and a number of other amazing dishes that had Bruce converted and sated by the end of the meal. "Good value," he decided.
We returned to the store, where one of the young guys was hunched over another console, the guts open and tools applied. The other one showed us Bruce's console, plugged it into a couple of ready plugs and fired it up. The TV in the corner showed the familiar PlayStation logo boot-up screen with a small addendum in a corner reading "Infinity." A game booted up and Bruce nodded his approval, pulling out some cash. As he unplugged it, the guy explained that you wanted to keep the cover open while you played, to avoid overheating: the unit wasn't made to support another chip.
"Cool," Bruce said to me as we left. "It reminds me of a customized hot rod, with the engine exposed." He patted his bag happily. "That was easy. I sort of expected more cloak-and-dagger stuff."
As it turned out, the stores at Pacific Mall could have used a little more discretion. A few months after our trip, I got a press release: "The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) and the Entertainment Software Association of Canada (ESAC) joined today in applauding the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's (RCMP) recent actions against numerous retail outlets offering pirate and counterfeit entertainment software for sale at Pacific Mall in Markham, Ontario."
The release originated from Highroad, a PR company that represents Microsoft and often sends me information about Xbox titles, so I took them up on their offer to chat with Danielle LaBossiere, executive director of ESAC.
ESAC is a trade organization made up of most of the game companies that, according to Danielle, serves civil warnings -- "kind of like cease-and-desist letters" -- to people violating copyright law and then "work[s] very closely to keep [the RCMP] abreast [of these violations]." Then, in the case of the "fairly successful raid on Pacific Mall," they (and other trade organization representatives from the movie and music industries) go with the RCMP to identify the bootlegged games. In the case of the Pacific Mall's Fun Desk, a retailer that had already had a warning, they were shut down in early May. No arrests were made.
Danielle was a political staffer before she was hired in October, a one-person operation supported by various "researchers" and a US parent organization in Washington. "Piracy's a huge problem in Canada ... it discourages innovation." Danielle was particularly outraged that the manufacture of mod chips is not actually illegal in Canada, just the use of them to circumvent copy protection.
Out of curiosity, I called Fun Desk a little more than a week later to see if they were open. They were, so I asked them if they sold PlayStation 2 games.
"Yes," he said, adding hastily: "But only originals."
I expect it'll be a while before I get any vegetarian dim sum again.
did i miss where it noted the irony, or did this entry miss the irony: that a starving artist is pirating. perhaps if piracy wasn't as pervalent, artists wouldn't be as starving.
—
rinku
(to rinku)Or perhaps you're an idiot with no understanding of art or economics.
—hitman
Instead of name calling, perhaps you can logically explain the reasoning behind your pirating? If you didn't support piracy, perhaps game companies like Working Designs would still be strong in business. (FYI, Working Designs almost went out of business in the recent past due to pre-production pirated leaks of their game titles. As a result, they made no revenue to continue their work. They, too, are starving artists barely holding on via loans.)
—Golgo-13
i believe that the real problem here is when these pirates started opening up to general consumers or getting careless, when it was chinese pirates selling to a chinese market, there were no issues.
I believe that out of greed they started opening up and hence raised their profile to the point of getting busted.
i suppose in the end all this is good as it trains the pirates on what they can and can't get away with. As it is now, every bust useuaully mulitplies the number of pirate outlets that open up later on!
i think that for those of us who enjoy pirated media, there is no real threat to the market, just sit tight, they'll be back next week.
personally rather than calling people names( those against piracy) , amore effective way to get back at them is to buy more pirated media!
ha ha!
—
How the mighty have fallen. Last weekend I talked my wife to taking the long trek with me to The Pacific Mall. The so called Mecca for pirated DVD movies and games. While there were two places selling much older copies of DVD's, all the major stores had their English language DVD's hidden until later in the day. Every store I went into had thousands of copies of Cantonese and Mandarin language DVD's out for anyone to see. I guess that it's ok to sell pirated DVD's as long as they don't come under the jurisdiction of the MPAA. I asked around what time they would bring out the English language discs, after a couple of stern "we no sell english" I gave up. At one point I remembered that the store I was in had DVD's of TV Shows. So I asked the lady for a copy of 24 Season 3, something I have yet to find at the stores for sale. Well, it wasn't to be had here either. She almost took my head off. I explained that I had seen english DVD's there before, she replied "new owner, new owner". By now, I started feeling like I was being discriminated against for being non-chinese, so I took it upon myself to inform the lady that I would be back to check in a few hours. If she thinks I'm a cop, let her really think it. They probably went through the day expecting "the cop" to come back any second. So be it.
—Rui
30% of the business at pacific mall are related to pirated DVD's and computer software. These business are run by real life chinese triads.
—stopem
You're all idiots.
Live and let die.
—gomisute
where can you buy the pirated cheap video games in toronto or a place to buy video games at a low price in toronto please help
—?
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