Vatican = Pirates??

Vatican Faced Problem with Pirates

It recently became known that Vatican, one of the few theocratic states ever created by a fascist regime, faced a pirate problem. Back in 2012, the release of the videogame Football Manager had code inside which would let the Sega developers track the IP of everyone who pirated a copy of the game.

So, the experiment showed that over 10 million copies were distributed illegally. As usual, the most pirated areas were China, Turkey and Portugal. In addition, the developers managed to trace one pirated copy inside the Vatican. In other words, the state with a population of 839 is statistically likely to have at least one pirate in its ranks. In comparison, the game was pirated by 540,000 Italians, with Italy having a population of 61.321 million – as you can see, one pirate in the Vatican isn’t that much higher on the ratio scale.

However, the consequences differ. While in Italy the worst that a pirate can expect is for the entertainment industry to sue them, in the Vatican they can expect excommunication and eternal damnation. The industry experts point out that this is just another proof that stiff sentences for piracy don’t work in real life.

This case had some pabulum for reflection: conspiracy theorists pointed out that the videogame was downloaded in the same year that Pope Benedict suddenly cleared out his desk and moved to Castle Gandolfo to spend time “in seclusion and prayer”.

In the meantime, Football Manager boss Miles Jacobson claimed that one pirated copy didn’t equal one sale lost – instead, he believes it added up to 176,000 lost sales ($3.7 million lost revenue).