In November 1984 Your Computer opened a special section on software piracy with a headline that put a price on it: “The £100,000,000 robbery”. The article claimed that “an unauthorised copy of a program is made every three seconds”. It gave no source for either number, but its readers knew the practice behind them. A game came on an ordinary audio cassette, and anyone with a twin-deck stereo could copy it. By the end of the decade copying had its own legislation, its own trade bodies, its own advertising campaigns and an organised international underground.
Fast facts
- Earliest complaint: Bill Gates’s “Open Letter to Hobbyists”, February 1976, about copies of Altair BASIC.
- Methods: tape-to-tape copying on twin-deck recorders; copy programs and copy cartridges; swapping disks by post and at copy parties; pirate bulletin boards.
- Industry bodies in Britain: the Guild of Software Houses; the Federation Against Software Theft (FAST), from 1984; the European Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA), from 1989.
- Law in Britain: software named as protected by an amendment to the Copyright Act in 1985; the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
- Protection: turbo loaders such as Speedlock, Lenslok, manual look-ups and code wheels, and disk schemes such as Copylock.
Before home computers
The argument is older than the home computer. In February 1976 Bill Gates, whose company, Microsoft, had written the BASIC for the MITS Altair, wrote an open letter to the hobbyists who used it. BYTE summarised it that September: “it now appears that more copies of Altair’s BASIC have been pirated than have been legally sold”. Gates, BYTE reported, had put three man-years and $40,000 of computer time into the program. “As most of the hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software.”
The same BYTE article, by Calvin Mooers, gave the practice a name that stuck: “Software piracy is a white collar (no gun) type of crime. It is easy to commit and hard to detect.”
Tape to tape
In Britain the home computer boom ran on cassettes. “Tapes are easy to copy,” Commodore Horizons told its readers in February 1984, “as anyone with a twin-deck stereo system will testify.”
That put computer games inside a fight that had started in music. The British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the record companies’ trade body, was running its “Home taping is killing music” campaign against people copying albums, and pressing for a levy on blank tapes. In 1984 Amstrad, which launched its CPC 464 computer that year, advertised twin-cassette music centres that could copy a tape at twice the normal speed. “You can even make a copy of your favourite cassette,” its advertisements said. The BPI warned Amstrad and its retailers that this encouraged illegal copying, and Alan Sugar sued it.
The case ran for four years. In the High Court in 1985 Mr Justice Whitford found against Amstrad. Your Computer pointed out that this was “doubly embarrassing” for a company that also sold software through its Amsoft label. FAST called the ruling “a welcome development”, and the magazine expected software bodies to use it against the makers of copying devices such as Evesham Micros’ Interface III. The Court of Appeal reversed the ruling, and on 12 May 1988 the House of Lords decided that selling a machine that could copy was not the same as authorising people to copy. Lord Templeman was blunt about the law on home copying: “the beat of Sergeant Pepper and the soaring sounds of the Miserere from unlawful copies are more powerful than law-abiding instincts or twinges of conscience. A law which is treated with such contempt should be amended or repealed.”
Tape copies had a physical limit. Simon Goodwin explained in CRASH at the end of 1985 that tape-to-tape copies “could only go through two or three generations before the hiss and distortion added at each step made further copying impossible”. Copy programs removed the limit. “At the start of 1983 the first clone programs became available,” he wrote; they read a game into the computer’s memory and could save “any number of further copies”.
The industry organises
According to Your Computer, British software houses at first aimed their anger at schoolchildren swapping copies. In October 1984 Acorn User quoted Nick Alexander, chairman of the Guild of Software Houses: “For every legitimate tape sold, 10 or 12 copies are made”. Chris Holland of Salamander Software put it nearer six, but said that “between £100m and £150m is lost in this country alone each year”. Alexander claimed that when Imagine collapsed that July, “50 to 60 per cent of the problem was due to copying”. The Coventry publisher PSS refused to advertise in any magazine that carried advertisements for tape or disk copiers.
The same year the software industry set up its own trade body. Your Computer reported that the Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) had been formed “by the likes of IBM, Acornsoft, Sinclair, Microsoft, WHSmith, Thorn EMI and Virgin”, with the aim of getting software the legal protection that records and films already had. Nicholas Lyell MP introduced a bill to name software in the Copyright Act that July. By then, he said, the software houses’ mood had changed: “We are not after the schoolboy, but we are after the commercial pirates.” The change became law in 1985. The cracking scene entry tells that part of the story in more detail.
The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 went further. As it passed through Parliament an amendment proposed making it illegal to sell copying devices. Romantic Robot, the maker of the Multiface, took this seriously. Its June 1989 advertisement in Your Sinclair warned that “because of possible implications of the coming new Copyright Act the MULTIFACE may soon be NO LONGER SOLD in the UK”, and took £10 off every model.
“It’s no game any more”
The campaigns came to the games magazines at the end of the decade. In May 1989 FAST took a full page in The Games Machine: a burning skull and crossbones, the word PIRACY, and the line “It’s no game any more. For every game you copy you are depriving programmers of their livelihood.” The same advertisement ran in ST/Amiga Format that July.
ELSPA, the European Leisure Software Publishers Association, followed with its own campaign. In January 1990 CRASH explained that magazines were giving ELSPA advertising space free of charge for a “Piracy Is Theft” campaign. Its advertisement set two disks side by side: “This disk costs £14.99. This disk could cost £2,000. It’s against the law to pirate software. You can be fined £2,000 or go to prison for six months.” CRASH spelt out where the money from a £10 game went: about £3 to the shopkeeper, £2 to the distributor, £3.50 to the software house and £1.50 to the programmers. It claimed that software houses were cutting back on Spectrum games because piracy had pushed sales so low.
Protection and the people who broke it
Publishers also tried to make copying harder, and each method had its answer. On tape, turbo loaders stored data in a form that ordinary copiers could not read. The best known on the Spectrum was Speedlock, first used by Ocean on Daley Thompson’s Decathlon in 1984, which set off months of argument on CRASH’s letters page. Lenslok, a plastic prism viewer that unscrambled a code on the screen, arrived with the Spectrum version of Elite at the end of 1985. It went wrong at once: some copies shipped with the wrong lens. CRASH still thought it “the best anti-piracy device that the home computer market has seen so far”.
On the Amiga and Atari ST one name dominated. Rob Northen’s Copylock wrote a track that a normal disk drive could read but not write. In 1992 Northen estimated for Amiga Joker that he had protected about three to four hundred games. The full history of these schemes is in the copy protection entry.
Against them stood the crackers. By 1988 Commodore User could count nearly 50 cracking groups in Germany and a dozen in Britain, racing each other to remove the protection from each new release and put their name on the result. Their title screens became crack intros, and their demos grew into the demo scene. In the 1990s the swapping moved on to bulletin boards. The cracking scene entry covers them in full.
Claims about losses
Nobody could measure piracy directly. Most of the figures came from the industry’s own bodies and companies, and they did not agree.
| Year | Who | Claim |
|---|---|---|
| 1984 | Nick Alexander, Guild of Software Houses | 10 or 12 copies for every legitimate tape sold |
| 1984 | Chris Holland, Salamander Software | nearer six copies; £100m to £150m lost in Britain each year |
| 1984 | Your Computer | £100 million; an unauthorised copy every three seconds |
| 1988 | “upper estimates” reported by Commodore User | up to half of publishers’ sales |
| 1995 | John Loader, ELSPA’s chief investigator | £778.5 million in the UK alone |
| 1996 | Geoffrey Webster, chief executive of FAST | £600 million lost to the software industry, £400 million of it business software; up to 74 per cent of home users’ software unlicensed, in a FAST survey |
The other side had its own arguments. The crackers told Commodore User in 1988 that games were overpriced at £20 to £25. In March 1996 Amiga Shopper asked whether piracy harmed the Amiga or had “actually contributed to its survival”, and Webster himself said that the size of the problem in the home market was unclear. By May 1999 Amiga Format had no doubt: “Piracy is still killing the Amiga”.
Later years
The trade bodies outlasted the machines. ELSPA’s crime unit was raiding pirate bulletin boards and car boot sales in the mid-1990s, and pirates were copying CD-ROMs by then too. ELSPA later renamed itself, and since 2010 it has been Ukie, the Association for UK Interactive Entertainment, which gives its founding year as 1989.
Sources
- Calvin N. Mooers, “Are You an Author?”, BYTE issue 13, September 1976, pp. 18–24: “software piracy”; Bill Gates’s open letter in Computer Notes, February 1976, and the Altair BASIC figures.
- Pete Gerrard, disk drive review, Commodore Horizons, February 1984, p. 19: tapes and twin-deck stereos.
- Meirion Jones, “The £100,000,000 robbery”, Your Computer, November 1984, pp. 72–73: the three-seconds claim; the BPI’s “Home taping is killing music” campaign and blank-tape levy; FAST’s founders and aims; Nicholas Lyell’s bill and his comments on it.
- ACE issue 29, February 1990, industry timeline (“FAST Talking”): FAST set up in July 1984 to have the Copyright Act 1956 amended to cover software.
- Geoff Nairn, piracy feature, Acorn User issue 27, October 1984, p. 20: Nick Alexander, Chris Holland, Imagine and PSS.
- David Thomas, Alan Sugar: The Amstrad Story (Century, 1990), pp. 102–106: the BPI and Amstrad twin-deck case, from the 1984 advertisements to the House of Lords.
- CBS Songs Ltd v Amstrad Consumer Electronics plc, House of Lords, judgment of 12 May 1988, speech of Lord Templeman (public record).
- Your Computer, August 1985, pp. 12–13: news, “Amstrad piracy double-decker” (the High Court ruling, Amsoft, FAST, Interface III).
- Simon Goodwin, Tech Tips, CRASH issue 24, Christmas Special 1985, pp. 152–153: tape-to-tape generations and clone programs.
- CRASH issue 26, March 1986, pp. 9–10: the Lenslok report. Issue 44, September 1987: profile of David Aubrey Jones (Speedlock and Daley Thompson’s Decathlon).
- Mike Pattenden, “Piracy: hacking at the industry’s roots”, Commodore User, June 1988, pp. 93–95: the groups, prices and estimates of losses.
- Your Sinclair issue 42, June 1989, p. 66: Romantic Robot advertisement.
- The Games Machine issue 18, May 1989, p. 4, and ST/Amiga Format issue 13, July 1989, p. 25: FAST advertisement.
- CRASH issue 72, January 1990, p. 25: ELSPA’s “Piracy Is Theft” campaign and the £10 breakdown; p. 29: ELSPA advertisement.
- Dr. Freak, interview with Rob Northen, Amiga Joker, March 1992: the number of games protected.
- CU Amiga, February 1995, p. 17, and Amiga Shopper issue 46, February 1995: John Loader of ELSPA and the £778.5 million claim.
- David Taylor, “Piracy unmasked”, Amiga Shopper issue 60, March 1996, pp. 22–23: Geoffrey Webster of FAST; CD-ROM piracy.
- Amiga Format issue 123, May 1999, p. 19: “Piracy is still killing the Amiga”.
- Ukie, “About” page (web, secondary): founded 1989. https://ukie.org.uk/about
- “The Association for UK Interactive Entertainment”, Wikipedia (web, secondary), citing Patrick Goss, “ELSPA to become UK Interactive Entertainment Association”, TechRadar, 19 March 2010: the 2010 renaming.