The Annual Xbox Live Pirate Massacre Has Begun

Microsoft has just brought the hammer down on Xbox pirates the world over. Supposedly over 600,000 Xbox Live accounts have been banned after Microsoft cleaned house, disconnecting anyone thought to be a pirate from Live permanently.

What’s unclear is what process Microsoft is using to determine that users actually violated the terms of use, though as of yet, I haven’t heard any cries about the banning of innocent people yet. Any modification of any sort violates the companies terms of use, though that rule is mostly in place to prevent people from getting mod chips which allow them to play pirated games. And with games at $60 a pop these days, video game piracy has the ability to be much more financially influential than $20 DVD or CD piracy.

However, whereas pirating TV shows, movies and music is a cake walk, a lot more work goes into pirating Xbox games. You’ve got to mod your console which can be pretty risky, you’ve got to download the massive game files, and you’ve got to actually burn them to a disk. That’s like, two more steps than regular piracy!  But seriously, I would never mod my console in that way, not because I think piracy of video games is wrong (I think $60 games are unabashed price gouging), but becuase I wouldn’t want anyone messing around with my already fragile Xbox, which has died twice already. And once you open it up, your warranty evaporates, and I’d have to buy a brand new one from scratch if anything happened to it.

The ban of 600,000 people is justified in my eyes. I mean, it’s not self-destructing their consoles, it’s just banning them from Live, they can still play local aspects of any and all pirated games. Part of me is just mad I’m not clever enough to pirate games myself, but my general theory with piracy is if you get caught, you have it coming, and you probably stole a lot more than you’re getting punished for. The exception to this rule however, are those few RIAA court cases in which plantiffs are told to pay millions of dollars for a handful of stolen songs, which is by definition, cruel and unusual punishment. And yes, that is my definitive legal opinion.

So long as Microsoft has an ACCURATE way of banning pirates, I don’t see this being an issue, and I don’t blame the company for the purge. Now, about banning all these annoying 12 year olds…

[via BBC]