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Why are you stealing my games? It's a question asked recently by U.K. computer game developer Cliff Harris on his blog. The following is an edited excerpt of my interview with Harris:

GORDON: What did pirates tell you about why they steal and distribute games?

HARRIS: There's two reasons that sort of jostle for the top position, but I'd say the top one is probably the price. I got more comments on the cost of games -- a lot of people saying they just don't have the money, there are lots of games coming out that they would like to play or would like to buy but there's no way they can afford them.

GORDON: What was the other reason?

HARRIS: Copy protection -- any form of digital rights management, whether the game connects over the Web to authorize itself or checks that the CD was in the drive. All of those things were very unpopular. There was a lack of trust. You had some people who actually had technical problems with them (DRMed games) and they caused problems on their computer or it was inconvenient because of the way they used their computer.