No, seriously. In perhaps one of the strangest developments in California politics since Arnold Schwartzenegger was elected governor, head of the San Diego GOP Committee Tony Krvaric was at one time an actual, bona fide warez kiddie. For those of you not familiar with warez, they’re basically copyrighted material made available for download without providing payment to the publisher. Basically, it’s music piracy but for games and applications. And Krvaric was co-founder of Fairlight, a group that would eventually evolve into an international piracy group that is, according to law enforcement authorities, among the world’s largest such enterprises.

Now, there are plenty of people out there who call politicians, especially REPUBLICAN politicians, crooks, but it’s a surprise to see that a San Diego Republican actually WAS a criminal. Krvaric himself, not surprisingly, refers to the whole affair as a “hit piece”, designed to force Republicans to “take (their) eye off the ball in 2008″.

But perhaps this may be a good thing–with an influential Republican with this kind of background in charge, maybe the opportunity finally exists to go after the RIAA, whose tactics verge on the downright evil and include suing the elderly, the children and the dead. Krvaric, meanwhile, is determined not to let anyone “get away with” distracting Republicans from the 2008 elections by distracting them with tales of his youth as a quasi-illegal software pirate. Which is, sadly, not surprising, but hopefully something good can yet come of all this.

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Categories: Video games //