Music pirates on the run in new video game

By Jon Healey
Los Angeles Times

Computer game maker MGI takes a shot at music bootleggers with its new game. The company hopes to get the music industry to distribute the game to schools for free. Bloomberg News Service

That would be the Funny Bureau of Investigations, and the chase would take place in the make-believe world of a computer game based loosely on Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island." But the underlying message is serious: Don't bootleg music.

The game is being developed by Music Games International, a privately held company that is run by three émigrés from the former Soviet Union: Igor Tkachenko, Roman Yakub and Alexander "Sasha" Gimpelson. "The Music Pirates Game," due out in the spring, will be the fourth interactive music title from the company.

Tkachenko, a concert pianist and composer, said MGI had set out to create a game about the yo-ho-ho kind of pirates. But when the trio started researching the topic of piracy, they were overwhelmed with information about music copyrights.

Their goal is to persuade the Recording Industry Association of America to distribute the game free to schools.

"We believe it's a great benefit to the RIAA," Gimpelson said. "Either you can teach them now or sue them later."

An RIAA spokeswoman said it had not been contacted by MGI, "but we welcome anyone's participation in the battle against piracy."

The RIAA has launched a few educational campaigns against illegal downloading. It is best known, however, for suing online file-sharing companies and the people who use them. Although the group has won key court battles and collected thousands of dollars from infringers, file-sharing continues to attract tens of millions of people and CD sales continue to slide.

Unlike the RIAA, which has focused its educational efforts on college students, Tkachenko prefers to target young students who don't expect music to be free.

And the best way to deliver an anti-piracy message isn't to scare kids, he said, but to ridicule bootleggers.

So in MGI's game, only the bootleggers' ringleader is portrayed as evil. The rest of the pirates are "kids who love music, and they don't know better," he said.