The regulation around intellectual property lays the foundations for best practices, while the market limits or challenges these regulations.
For Michael Lewis, vice president of Protection and Security of Intellectual Property of The Entertainment Software Association (ESA), “technology is always one step ahead of regulation, our work is based on promoting best practices and reducing risks”.
In order to bring the world of technology closer to the regulators, the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property (IMPI) and the ESA signed an agreement whose main objective is to implement actions that contribute to reducing the illegal exploitation of creative rights related to video games in their digital and physical formats.
Although the intention is to reduce piracy, the scope of this type of practice seeks to make the market aware of irregular practices and warn of the various risks in Latin American markets. It also seeks to prevent the distribution and sale of unauthorized software.
Piracy has been reduced by new digital formats, since, according to Lewis, a decade ago 80% of games were purchased in physical formats and 20% were digital. Today the trend is diametrically different and 80% of purchases are online.
And although this illegal practice emerges as a resource for people to access products in a simpler way or at a lower cost, digitization has helped reduce this problem but has brought new potential risks.
Risks of video game piracy
The first and most obvious is the cost for companies, which Lewis mentions that it is not possible to calculate it, but it is estimated to cost millions of dollars per year, however, this loss is the least of the concerns, since one of the great risks it’s in products designed for piracy.
For example, the marketing of consoles modified to be able to load hundreds of pirated games, torrents or direct downloads from clouds such as Drive or Dropbox, have a potential danger.
In a similar way to what happens with music piracy, in video games information is stored in clouds and those who resort to these practices earn from advertisements. However, due to the size of the download, these gains can be exponentially higher. While a song or album is in the 30 megabyte download range, the most sought after games can exceed 100 GB. Generating higher income in a more sustained time, which can lead to the next risk.
“There are different concerns that go beyond limiting income. Hacking in video games opens up the possibility of multiple vulnerabilities, for example, the theft of private information, phishing or even as a way to find errors or flaws to hack entire systems.
This agreement also includes a series of resources to protect the industry and the user globally: Attack the distribution format of these pirate consoles, imported from countries such as the United States or China and sold through a marketplace, according to the ESA .
In alliance with the National Customs Agency of Mexico, IMPI seeks to identify, block and confiscate these products. Same with game download links directly online on drives. Similar to what happened in the case of Cuevana or Mega.
Who does this benefit?
These measures are daily understood as a way to protect multinational companies or large conglomerates. However, Kiyoshi Tsuru, founding partner of TMI Abogados and a fundamental part in the creation of the agreement, mentions that “large companies already have formats to protect themselves, they have lawyers with resources to protect themselves. The intention is to strengthen the national market and local developers”.
For example, the ESA holds conferences and workshops with the software development programs of the Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey to raise awareness, spread good practices, and establish the importance of intellectual property during the creation of video games in our country.
Can the business model make a change?
While in music or movies one of the formats that reduced piracy was streaming, making content accessible in a simple way, these models try to replicate in video games.
Formats such as GamePass from Xbox, or PSPlus from PlayStation, help the end user to have more titles at a lower cost. It is not only about restricting access and limiting distribution in order to prevent piracy, but also giving the gamer more resources, point out IMPI and ESA.
Downloading pirated software on consoles, computers and mobile phones opens the doors for the entry of malicious software, which ranges from stealing user information, to hacking servers, filling servers with bots, among many other consequences that damage the experience of gamers.
