The Man On The Street has a confession to make this month, viewers.

Your intrepid reporter has been caught red-handed in the act of a heinous crime, and would like to throw himself on the mercy of the court, and by way of mitigation has YET ANOTHER fantastic and constructive idea for you, the nation’s hard-pressed videogame retailers. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

You see, The Man On The Street is a big fan of American psychiatrist Cheers-spinoff sitcom Frasier. Your correspondent was delighted to note recently that Channel 4 would be showing the final series of the classic show on UK television, but slightly dismayed to observe that it had been stuck on a graveyard slot (11.05pm on Wednesdays), and broadcast with almost no advertising or trailers for either the series as a whole or individual episodes. As a result, with mounting irritation, The Man On The Street managed to miss every one of the first six shows in the series. And it was at that point, viewers, that your reporter’s morals failed him, and he entered the shadowy world of INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY THEFT, ie he went and downloaded them off the internet. You’re quite right, of course – death’s too good. But hold on a second.

A couple of weeks later, The Man On The Street’s email program “binged” with a message from US lawyers BayTSP, a firm known for specialising in “copyright protection”. BayTSP had detected, they claimed, an infringing episode of Frasier being downloaded through The Man On The Street’s PC (though curiously, a different one to any of those your reporter actually had), and promptly issued all manner of dire legal warnings and threats of proceedings unless The Man On The Street put a stop to this society-destroying behaviour pronto – which, naturally, he did immediately.

But here’s where your correspondent had his epiphany. Because having firms of professional lawyers waste farcical amounts of time and money chasing halfway across the world to threaten people for downloading a copy of a freely-viewable television show that they’d missed a couple of weeks ago brought The Man On The Street to a realisation about the whole business of intellectual property “theft”, which was this – the more blatantly you do it, the less anybody minds.

Because if you skulk around with a filesharing program, or run a dodgy market stall flogging pirate copies, or a website giving away old game files for use with emulators, ELSPA, the ESA and their chums will be down on you like a ton of bricks. If, on the other hand, you decide to start completely ripping off other people’s games by producing unlicenced, uncredited clones and selling them for money, the industry will not only leave you alone, it’ll give you awards.

And if you follow that argument to its logical conclusion, combine the two things and go into business selling illegal pirated software **openly and unashamedly**, putting it into pretty boxes and persuading shops to put it on their shelves rather than skulking around acting like a criminal, you’ll be left in peace to conduct a lucrative business like a proper and acceptable member of society.

Several years ago, The Man On The Street bought a couple of CDs from his local HMV, which contained thousands of Spectrum and Amiga game files. On examining the contents and realising that there was no possible way the publisher could have permission to distribute these files for profit, your reporter, curious, had a look on the web, and found that the same company was still selling discs of old copyrighted games for emulators, including those for consoles which were never even released in the UK. Compared to many similar sites long-since closed down by the industry’s ever-alert watchdogs, there were two main differences. Firstly, this website (we’ll call it, at random, “Unlimited Emulation CDs” or something) put its products in professional-style packaging, and secondly it charged extortionate sums for them – almost £70 for a disc containing several thousand old Amiga games, for example.

Public-spiritedly, and aware of the need to prevent such sums falling into the hands of the IRA, Al-Qaeda and Nazi child pornographers, The Man On The Street diligently filled in the website’s details on ELSPA’s “report piracy” forms, and waited for the industry’s brave stormtroopers to crash through “Unlimited Emulation”’s windows in the dead of night with truncheons and lawyers. Many weeks later, your reporter’s still waiting, and the company continues with its years-old piracy business unmolested.

What’s the moral of this story, retailers of the nation? The moral is this. If you’re worried about losing money to pirates, beat them at their own game. Stuff your shelves full of illegal copied games, flog them for money, and change your shop’s name to “JIMMY’S PIRATE VIDEOGAMES”. (NB If your name is not Jimmy, amend accordingly.) You’ll get all the advantages of a High Street location, all the best titles weeks before GAME has them in stock, a profit margin of almost 100%, and ELSPA will never bother you, because if you present yourself as a nice legitimate businessman rather than a criminal, then clearly you must be one. Sometimes, retail pals, the best way to be invisible is to stand right out in the open, in the nude, painted blue and screaming. Don’t ask The Man On The Street how he knows that.