It’s a known fact that without piracy, Windows would have never become popular. Piracy is flattering and indirect way of viral marketing.
Another good example of this is when Sony entered the console market… their Playstation 1 was cracked within no-time and helped gaining Sony’s platform popularity and following: people that would also buy the next-gen. Same goes for the xbox. Do you really believe they couldn’t have made it more difficult to crack? I think they’re made intentionally… crackable. In fact, if you look at the console market, all really hard to crack consoles had a harder time surviving (or completely died).
I used alot of pirated software in the past, but notice now that I’m earning money, that I’m buying more and more from the smaller developers. 500 euro for a MS office is still a rip-off, same goes for Photoshop. If they’d price it 200, I’d happily buy them.
I agree with everyone who posts about excessively annoying DRM and license protection. I recently had to re-install some commercial electronic-lock programming software (It’s essentially a front-end to a SQL db for logical access control). It took me two weeks to get the developer to explain how to get the hardware dongle working. I’m relatively certain that I could have found a crack for the software in a matter of minutes, had I not had a need for legit software. Now I have a USB port permanently occupied by a useless dongle. Boo!
For my money, the least end-user-abusive DRM I ever saw was a game called Alone in the Dark circa about 1995. There was a smallish (2 by 2) book with about 100 pages of pale-yellow-ink printed key codes. The codes were too pale to be copied by a photocopier, and even if you got that to work, there were still 100+ pages (duplex) to copy. Each time the game started, it displayed a page number, and required the player to enter the key-code from that page.
Finally, a slight digression, but am I the only one who’s sick of seeing those PSAs at the beginning of DVDs warning against piracy? It makes no sense, I paid for the DVD, and if I were to pirate it, I wouldn’t sacrifice quality for that Extra PSA, meaning a pirated copy wouldn’t include the PSA. Hey MPAA, please don’t punish those who buy movies by treating them like pirates!
It’s pretty simple, if you pirate, you’re a dick. Anyone saying otherwise is simply trying to justify themselves out of being a dick, because THEY can’t POSSIBLY be that guy.
News flash to pirates, you are that guy
And for simplicity sake, I’m speaking about the person who doesn’t spend a dime toward a program that specifically says you have to pay for it, not those who crack their games after they’ve bought them or re-download because they lost their CD.
The problem is not that people are pirating software, it’s that the software industry’s monetizing model is based on the old one created for physical objects:
Money = Virtual Power
Trade Money for Object X
In order to stop piracy, companies need to adapt to it. As you said, piracy will not stop. So why not adapt, which as humans we have done for eons.
Look at Blizzard with WoW, look at all of the online services running on ad revenue. They are raking in the cash, without the threat of piracy!
These arnt the best answers, but I’m sure there are far better ones yet undiscovered. We need to stop focusing on the stoping piracy and start figuring out ways to remove its need, ways that are good for the user and good for the developer.
Isn’t ‘open-source business model’ a bit like congressional ethics? People talk about it a lot, but I’ve never seen any such thing.
Chuck on December 27, 2008 10:07 AM
Man, this post couldn’t have dropped at a more appropriate time in my life. I just release my first for sale piece of software two weeks ago, and it’s already been cracked and is making the rounds on the 'tubes.
Part of me is flattered - I’m worthy of being pirated. The rest of me is pissed. This is not something I squirted out over the weekend. This is something that I have labored over for years, and now some turd is out there giving it out for free.
Cybercat hit it right. If you’re a pirate, you’re a dick.
You wouldn’t steal a lawnmower from the John Deere dealership when you need to mow your lawn, would you?
@Sam: Maybe I am missing something here but if developers want to make their software pirate proof, why don’t they maintain a database of serial numbers. Each one of them can only be used once and the product has to call home to that database of keys to be activated.
Simple. You patch the .exe at the assembly level, so that if(server_said_its_legal) turns into if(!server_said_its_legal), or you add a jump at the beginning that skips all the call home code.
@Tim:
This post might have well not have been written. It is useless except as a vehicle to get people posting here and traffic driven to your website.
I’m not so sure - it gave me information about a cool new game I hadn’t heard of that I just bought a copy of. So have a few other correspondents above. A small strike for a small software company, I’d say, and an enjoyable game playing session to boot.
People like screaming DRM all around, many of those forget that Steam is also DRM. I like to call Steam as: DRM that works (in favor of users not against them). Yet the whole Steam is also built to suck every last penny of the customers as possible like Jeff said in a previous entry.
Simple software protection (enter a 20 digit code, lock it against some feature of your computer by an activation process) does work to prevent casual piracy. It doesn’t prevent all piracy, but it does prevent most (even when there is some crack program available over bit torrent – most casual users don’t have the time.)
The higher the price of the software, the more likely people are to try to crack it.
In days past it was true that teenagers had more time than money so they could spend their time cracking. Today however, via sites like guru.com and rentacoder.com it is possible for them to monetize that time and do something more productive with their lives. That is something that needs to get out there.
Equating copying with piracy is in itself propaganda for the most fundamentalist form of copyright protection and extortion.
I’ll support the programmer if the programmer supports me, ie, i’ll pay if I get access to and the freedom to use the source code. Otherwise, try choosing a different business model than the one invented by the major corporations that can afford the extortion and intimidation tactics that are needed to support it.
And if you are a tiny 2 man independent programming shop using that business model in the 21st century is just as insane as trying to invade another country with 2 guys and a bb-gun.
There is no fair price for screwing your customers (although the iPhone Apps store’s so low you don’t care about getting screwed anymore prices come close), unless maybe if you start calling it what it actually is: renting services instead of buying software, the latter being the big stinking lie of the copyright era (which future generations will probably refer to as the second dark ages).
Why not just accept reality? If you want to make money off of applied mathematics, then you better make a product attached to a subscription service.
If I want to buy a car, do I buy a license to the styling or engineering of the car? No, I buy an inefficient piece of metal. Since CDs are worthless, and processing cycles on a server less so, software producers should restyle themselves as a part of the service industry. e.g., subscription providers.
Apple Computer (not the only company) made billions of dollars selling computer hardware. The fact that everyone had access to a giant pirated library of software helped sell more units.
It isn’t/wasn’t in their interest to develop any sort of strategy to combat pirating as it would only serve to reduce their hardware sales.
I see only two ways to really reduce this problem. Neither is perfect.
Utilize private/public encryption key technology at the microprocessor level and have software producers encrypt custom binary images for every package sold.
or
Accept the fact that at current prices people aren’t willing (or 90% aren’t) to buy your product and reduce your prices AND add value to the sale.
How do you add value? Lots of ways. Regular updates with new features and bug fixes, forum access where customers can talk to the developers. Being responsive to their needs.
Never played Goo World, never will. But what would players enjoy? New Goo worlds, Goo levels, Goo things? Once a month updates to keep peoples interest and keep things from getting stale. Updates that only registered users can download, of course.
In a way we have created a very strange industry. I’m not talking about just software development, but the market as a whole.
The market has decided to punish legal users; you know the ones who actually buy the stuff, with higher fee’s to subsidize the people who are stealing the product. But every time they raise prices they drive more people to steal their product.
Then they create advertisements teaching people that you CAN actually steal their stuff. Every time I see a satellite pirating commercial I wonder how many people decided at that moment to go out and buy an illegal unit.
The online guys have it figured out though. You aren’t going to be playing WoW or downloading free stuff from iTunes without being legal……
