Welcome to first pilot episode of the GeekBits Podcast: A Discussion about Piracy. This being the first of two pilot episodes, there are audio glitches here and there and a tiny bit of echo due to the room not being perfect acoustically. If you’re watching the video version, you’ll notice the camera angles aren’t the greatest. One camera even stops recording because we didn’t know it had a hard limit. Know that we are working on ordering the proper equipment, preparing the room acoustics, and even a set background. So please enjoy this first pilot episode while we prepare the future!
A Discussion about Piracy
In this episode we take a look at piracy from our perspective. The good, the bad, and the ugly. And let’s be honest. It’s mostly ugly. This episode is hosted by brothers Mike and David Murray of The Geek Pub and The 8-Bit Guy, along with our friend since childhood Craig Bowes.
We talk about our lives as teen pirates with the Commodore 64; the ridiculous ways that companies have incentivized people to pirate (slow or even damaging DRM, unskippable trailers and ads on DVD/Blu-ray media); how the public is forced to resort to piracy in order to liberate content that was legally paid for; the new attempt to just make us all rent our content forever; and more!
And what’s all this resurgence of vinyl and physical medias about? Do people actually like having a physical copy of their media? Remember when games like Ultima came with cloth maps and other trinkets?
Could piracy actually be eliminated? Could media companies create a world where piracy is no longer a problem? Let’s explore!
I think U3 was also the first game I “borrowed” 🙂 But more than made up for it with pledges to Shroud of the Avatar.
Major pet peeve of mine are the Bluray/DVDs that have no way to skip the previews at the beginning. Makes me want to pirate them since they remove those.
Really liked the series Northern Exposure. Wanted to collect on DVD but found out due to licensing deals and the fact that the show was recorded before the DVD era, the original music (which was major part of what made the show so great) was not included on the DVD’s. Apparently the European version has the original music but need a region free player to play them.
GEOS was the first time I came across some hefty copy protection. Hey it was something like $99.95 and a friend of mine had it. So I tried to copy it and it failed badly. The computer picked up it was bootlegged and reset the machine as if I sent SYS64738 to it.
Meanwhile, Napster was the first time I ever got a data-destroying virus! Can’t remember what I downloaded but it required A LOT of work to remove it!