Commentators on sites I hold in high regard have staunch anti-piracy views, as in, they seem to really believe in staunching the massive blood flow of piracy before the gaming industry bleeds out and are not just parroting an obvious talking point in order to keep their advertisers' business or their jobs. The shrill rhetoric has hit new decibelic levels of ragenoise and red-facedness with the flagrantly contemptuous move by Ubisoft to require PC players of their games to remain connected to the internet at all times or suffer the consequences of instaquitting progress rape. It's like the opposite of Progress Quest! Gamers With Jobs has an especially astute (if mildly conspiratorial, but these are the times we live and game in) take on Ubisoft's potential motivations for this epically hard DRM boner that they are using to bludgeon people that pay for their games (people that pirate their games will, of course, be exempt). The author of the article takes special care to affirm his anti-piracy stance: "Rather than take this to the next level of a broad and meaningless call to social action — Boycott Ubi, yo! — I have chosen instead to realize this is a very personal choice where no available option seems particularly desirable. Do I reward Ubi with my money in the hope that they might be grudgingly forced to create more PC games with even tighter restrictions? Do I deny myself the experience of playing a game I had been looking forward to? Do I build flimsy self-justifications for piracy, choosing to contribute to the problem out of an overwhelming sense of self-entitlement and convenient moral flexibility?

"Ok, obviously not that last one. Whatever moral subjectivity it is that endows people with the latitude to pretend like rules don’t apply if they are sufficiently mad at the victim just doesn’t work for me. So, for me, the choice is only one of buy or sit out."

This is a good quote because it encapsulates both sides' arguments without too much rhetoric to get in the way. It also demonstrates what both confuses and irks me about the piracy debate; both sides default to irreconcilable moral arguments. That is not how to reach an understanding—that is how wars begin. It stems from the fragility of both arguments; anti-piracy advocates don't want to look like shills for the publishing monoliths, and pirates don't want to look like spineless thieves. Pirates instead create for themselves an anti-corporate sentiment that excuses such theft as an appropriate weapon in The Resistance by which the unfair business practices of DRM-happy publishers will be torn down and replaced with a New World Order of wide, cheap access to games. Anti-pirates maintain that stealing is stealing, it's against the Law (narrowly avoiding "corporate shill" status by going straight to government—for what it's worth—and striving to derive virtue from venerable old ideas like the Social Contract), and so it cannot possibly be justified no matter what the circumstances. Not a lot of common ground between these two entrenched positions—more like a no-man's land. And woe to those caught in the middle, especially when the hardline anti-pirate perspective automatically discredits anyone who's ever stolen a game ever unless they are a hardcore penitent. Too easy is it to find a message board argument that dissolves into an inquisition as those willing to make an exception for piracy under dire circumstances are outed as people that oh yeah stole that one game a long time ago, and as soon as that slips out—their words mean nothing. It is infuriating to automatically "lose" an argument when the opposition refuses to acknowledge your standpoint and cuts your legs out from underneath you. But this is arguing on the internet; the point is not to convince people of your side of the debate—it is to make them feel like shit for not subscribing to your moral code.

The truth of the matter is that pirates are spineless thieves who champion an untenable position. The kicker is that it doesn't matter. This is a situation in which what ought to be matters not at all in light of what is; it is a bit like wondering if cancer is the moral outcome of high radiation dosages. The reality is that with a few clicks I can get something expensive for free; it is not a matter of morals but one of economics and paths of least resistance. I'm sorry, are you still debating the morality of piracy? Concocting excuses and slamming them down with self-righteous fury? I really apologize; I couldn't hear you—I was playing Dragon Age. I bought a Windows 7 license and pirated Dragon Age. It wasn't a matter of choosing one over the other—I had enough money to buy both. But I could not readily find a Windows 7 torrent that suited my liking, and the academic discount made it acceptably cheap. A good Dragon Age torrent was more readily found (with the DLC, no less!) and it was not discounted on Steam (of course not—I pointlessly missed the day it was discounted, shortly after the new year). These circumstances are presented merely as explanation for my actions—not justification. The only regret that I feel is that I do not own Dragon Age as I would prefer to—on Steam—but this will probably be rectified at some later point. I broke a law, or really a set of laws; no sense of indignation is strong enough to exempt me from them, and no sense of self-righteousness is strong enough to keep me from breaking them if the benefits sufficiently outweigh the costs. It certainly helps to believe the laws are stale and no longer fulfill their purpose of protecting the artists from which original content derives—indeed, that they no longer appropriately reflect reality—but the choice to break a law is a matter of piracy being the path of least resistance more than anything else. Painting a veneer of moralism over it does not make it a moral issue. To address anti-pirates more directly: the moral subjectivity that allows people to bend rules in their heads to make widespread piracy a possibility is probably the same moral subjectivity that allows people to shoot and kill other human beings when they are told it is their patriotic duty. To pirates: shut up about why you do things and just do them. You are the cancer everybody says you are. You will kill your prey, your body, your host, and then you too will die as something new and better rises to replace it.

Why groups of humans so frequently pick conflict before cooperation I do not understand, and indeed that question is beyond the scope of my championing of my own amoralism. The evidence is mounting that stricter DRM is only going to force everyone to retreat further into their rhetoric. The big publishing companies, faced with the impossibility of ending piracy with current practices, will eventually enter a detente with pirates and implicitly negotiate with them through more creative approaches than mass alienation, and the problem of piracy will fade away. Or both sides will perish in a mass conflagration.

Further refinements are sure to follow this path of thought.