My Experience in the land of Copyright Infringement*

*You have to make that DUN DUN DUN spooky music sound when you read the title, otherwise it doesn’t make as much sense.   

    First of all, everyone has heard of The Sims game, right?  Because you kind of need to know about that in order to understand this story.  The game is fully expandable, and user objects can easily be made and added to the game to make it more fun.  Because of this, there are countless sites out there that offer downloads for the game.  They are free to download.  At no point in time do you have to sign up or sign in to access these files.  Many of the sites don’t have a copyright notice, at least not until this whole fiasco happened, then they were quick to slap one up there as fast as possible. 

     Enough background, now here’s the story.  I had downloaded tons of this stuff for my game, I mean tons. Like 400 megabytes of stuff.  So it was all sitting there on my hard drive, constantly being added to and unzipped into my game.  Then one day I was on a hugely popular auction site who’s name I will not use because by this point I am terrified of getting sued for even blinking the wrong way.  I saw that a seller had compiled a list of all the stuff he had and was selling it on a disk.  I thought, hey, if it’s legal for him to do that, why can’t I?  So I made up my very detailed ad, noted at the bottom that people could find all this stuff for free on the internet, and that they WERE NOT paying for the files.  They were merely paying for my time and the cost of the CD, whatever they may have felt that to be worth.  I started the auction at $5 (I pay $30 a month for 90 hours of internet access, and I used CD-RW’s instead of R’s, which cost more), which I thought was very reasonable. Suddenly, the bids are jumping up and up, and I’m thinking “Yay!  A way to make a little extra money, just like my horoscope said!  Now I can afford Christmas!”.  I should have known it was too good to be true.  I think it was my detailed ad that did me in.  One of the site designers must have stumbled across my CD, and the next morning I received a nasty letter telling me that I was going to be reported to the aforementioned auction site it was on and that I was infringing on their copyrights, which is bullshit and I’ll tell you why in a minute.  Back to the letters, and there were tons.  The first one was alright, not too nasty really, and after a few exchanged emails, we had it settled, I said I wouldn’t sell it anymore, I honestly meant no harm, I was just selling MY time.  No harm done, right?  WRONG.  Within the next 24 hours I received about 25 emails, the basic gist of which was “You are garbage, you are a stupid motherfucker” and other explicit opinions about me as a person.  None of these people acted maturely, they didn’t even use proper grammar half the time. For the most part they sounded like insolent little 12 year old brats. 

I started deleting the emails like crazy, I had already pulled the auction, written said site to apologize for a listing violation I knew nothing about, and apologized to the one person who knew how to write a complete sentence.  Over and done with?  NOPE.  The next day I get an official letter from Electronic Arts, the company who makes the Sims accusing me of making copies of the game (someone lied to them, nice people huh?) and demanding that I turn over all the CD’s and practically sign my life away to them in the form of an Undertaking, whatever the hell that is.  So I throw up, cry, panic, and try to forget about it for the rest of the day.  As soon as I know my mom is awake, I call her crying because I don’t know what else to do and my Mom is very efficient at dealing with this stuff.  She tells me I’m not to sign anything, that I did nothing wrong, and spends her morning writing letters to people to get them to leave me alone.  In the end, EA backed off as long as I swear never to make another CD, which is fine with me because it’s more trouble than it’s worth.  Yes, I know, I’m 25 years old and shouldn’t have to run to my Mom every time something goes wrong. I don’t though, just when I can’t handle it and I know she can. 

     I said I would explain why the “violating copyrights” statement was BS.  Well, after going through this hell, I looked up some laws.  With electronic stuff like files on the web, in order to be protected you have to actually send the form in and pay to get a “real” copyright.  It is basically impossible to sue anyone without this.  Still, it’s wrong to steal someone else’s work and claim it as your own.  Which is why I didn’t.  I left every file intact, explained where it came from, and would have been more than happy to tell people where to download everything if they asked.  Once again, I WAS NOT selling files.  Is it my fault if people would rather pay someone else to download stuff for them because they don’t have the time?  Basically, this makes it against the law for you to give your little brother or sister a few bucks to sit at a computer and download some stuff for you.  It makes it against the law to pay a research assistant to go out and find information, then present it to you.  It makes it against the law to sell YOUR OWN time!

     Like I said, it’s over and done with.  I have nothing against EA, they make great games and I will continue to buy them.  They thought they were acting in their best interest. I’m sure they still do think that.  I feel otherwise, but am forced to comply with them nonetheless.  I do have negative feelings to the “Sim Community” because most of them are very nasty and immature. 

That’s it, that’s my story.  The moral: Youre time is not valuable, don’t try to sell it.

 ED. NOTE:  This story was written about around Dec 01.  Since then I have decided to go back to downloading from the sites.  I figure it would piss them off more to know that someone they obviously despised was still gaining pleasure from their stuff.