I have mixed opinions on piracy, though being a pirate myself, I guess it might be a bit hypocritical to judge others.
I personally pirate games and apps to ‘preview’ the software, to see if it’s really worth my money.
If a game or app is particularly awesome, then heck yea i’m buying it Just like World of Goo 3 I did recieve my first copy through ‘questionable’ means, i’ll admit, but… after playing it for a while, I grinned and coughed up my $20 for the real thing. It was just that awesome and beautiful to play, and I felt a bit guilty the first time through after finding out it was made by such a small group of developers. Also, recommended it to a few friends, who also bought it later on
There are always going to be pirates, and no game or software is ever going to be safe.
But to avoid this, all they have to do is put a little more time and effort into it, to change peoples’ minds, as well as stray away from putting ridiculous price tags, and security measures that punish their honest customers.
They own the right to control the distribution of their software. That’s what copyright is. When someone makes a copy of that software, they are, in effect, stealing the distribution rights. That is a real, legitimate loss that 2D Boy has suffered. The value that they legally possessed was diminished.
Of course nobody can own an idea if ownership means the ability to prevent other people from having it, and making a copy of a piece of software does not alter the state of the original. But that’s not how the concept ownership is applied to intellectual property, and nobody has tried to argue otherwise. To own the software you write means that you should be able to control its distribution. Nothing more, nothing less.
If you’re a pirate, you’re a dick. - So dick’s a pirate?
How bout this
If you’re a developer, you should do your due diligence on keeping honest people honest.
There are tons of very popular consumer shrink wrapped software out there that aren’t being pirated at all simply because the devs did their due diligence on implementing a simple and efficient copy protections. If you can’t be bothered to do the research then get a consultant.
Here’s a nice explanation of what the quoted phrase means, courtesy of Ozy:
It’s an English idiom to distinguish the common criminal from the hardcore lawbreakers.
For instance, suppose you have a nice lawnmower. Do you leave it out in the front yard over night, or do you lock it in a shed in your back yard? Most likely you lock it in a shed. But surely you realize that if someone REALLY WANTED TO, they could jump the fence, cut the lock, lift your lawnmower over the fence, and pawn it off despite your security measures. Nothing you would seriously consider doing can hope to stop a reasonably determined individual from taking your lawnmower, but that’s not what locked sheds are for: they’re for stopping the much more common individual who is willing to commit criminal acts when there is very little risk or difficulty. Thus, it may be said that putting your mower in a locked shed in your back yard instead of leaving it out front is a means of, “Keeping honest people honest.”
In other words: the imaginary conversion rate of a former pirate to an honest buyer is just 0,1%. This means it’s a more effective way to make a better game in order to get better sales rather than fighting piracy at all costs.
Similarly, a typical free-to-play game that supports itself via micro-transactions and/or optional subscriptions has less than 5% of its user base actually spending money on it, with at maximum 1% of the users making the gross of the income.
I’d like to sum it up like this: free-to-play is the future. See, it is already here, we just call it piracy and it is illegal. In future i expect to see a lot more games that are given away and spending money on it will be completely voluntary. And an additional positive side effect could be a reduction on compromised computers, since (my personal guesstimate) 95% of all cracks keygens are infected with trojans, backdoors and what not.
@steffenj: Free-to-play is not the future. As you already pointed out, IT DOESN’T MAKE MONEY.
Also, spending money on games is already completely voluntary. Nobody’s making you play games. Just watch — if games all go free-to-play with optional paid perks, people will start hacking the perks and say, In the future, I expect to see a lot more perks given away and spending money on them will be completely voluntary.
I have bought World of Goo and I love it. I am dismayed by the piracy rate, too. But I also think they did everything to get the highest piracy rate possible with every legal buyer getting a persistentn and non-personlized link to download the game.
Even if DRM is not the way to go - puting a visible email in the download link might already have made a difference. Retiring a link after X amount of downloads, too.
As some of the comments have suggested in various ways, the model isn’t effective. The price of a product will approach its marginal cost, and in the case of digital goods that is $0.
I am a professional software developer, and I have no intention of ever selling software. Even when I worked at a large software company and we sold Enterprise Software, realistically we weren’t selling the software. We were selling support, deployment/installation services, training, etc. The software was a vehicle for all of it.
Now I worked in web apps and, again - the software is free.
I think ultimately that’s how our entire industry will work.
The guys who make Reaper have it right, IMHO. It’s a free, unrestricted, unlimited demo, and then a reasonable price for a damned fine piece of software which is constantly updated, for free.
Like others have said, I won’t bother with a demo if there’s any kind of restriction and jump straight to the cracked version floating around the torrent networks (and I’ll often skip risking the extra download time too, if they don’t specifically say ‘unrestricted’). I refuse to pay for software unless I can ‘try before I buy’ on principle, and I don’t much care if it’s through official channels or not. The developers’ business sense is their concern, not mine
Tom, let me ask you the following: Imagine you invested hundreds of hours writing your next greatest app; invested into high quality 3rd party tools/libraries/etc (open source or otherwise); invested into technical writers, graphic designers, etc - so at the end you now have new greatest, coolest application. And lets assume that because it is so great it does not require neither support (because all written so well), nor deployment/installation support (because you use high quality installers and users can do it as click-click-click) nor training (because you have great software and great documentation) - now what? are you still planning to give it away fro free. If yes then let me ask you - what is your business model would be? When you are saying: I think ultimately that’s how our entire industry will work. - what industry are you talking about? If you are talking software development then this is to vague. You can not seriously pile-up together Enterprise grade applications and $0.99 iTunes apps.
Mr_Protection… Crypkey is a joke. A total nightmare. It resets it self constantally, and refused to run correctly on some pc’s. I swear, Crypkey drives people to piracy.
I agree with Jeff 100%. By paying for software, people are actually taking part in the evolution process - deciding what software shall survive and prosper and what should be forgotten. By pirating it, they are like behind a glass wall. Watching, but with no way to influence the future. The same applies to freeware. Despite giving it for free, it still did cost the time to make and unless the author gets compensated - no one will refuse a donation.
On the DRM and pirating: Piracy can only be solved by social means, not technological ones. In my shareware, I use a very trivial serial checking/evaluation counter. If someone wants to use it without paying, they know it is illegal and it is their decision and their problem. I am not fighting a lost cause.
I read this long list of comments, and it is sad, really sad, to see that no one is brave enough to even touch on the ethical implications of piracy. It always gets second billing to DRM, copyright law, economics and software delivery models. I feel like an old fart (at age 32) to even bring it up, but I think it should be said at least once. Want to help stop piracy? Talk to your kids about morals, and use a post like this as a start. I’m a programmer and a parent, and I know it doesn’t have to be an after school special, but at least start there. Most people I know that pirate, do it for one of two reasons:
They don’t think it is wrong.
They know it is wrong, but don’t care.
The vast majority are the former. As small an issue as it might seem, this one topic can provide a lot of insight into how your kids, friends and family view rights, and how far those rights extend in any civilized society.
i’ll add the fifth entry, have excellent support, especially true if it’s not a game software. somehow some people feel that support is cost while the software product because it’s doesn’t require any physical material to built it isn’t
As many posters have said, now I’m older and I can afford to, I pay for games and software; GTA 4 being the most recent purchase, it took forever to install and demanded that I sign up to two different gaming accounts to use it, it tried to install background services that start with XP takes forever to boot needs the disk and pissed me off royally - it took a day before I could even play it.
If I now downloaded a cracked illegal copy that won’t give me all this hassle even though I paid for a legal copy, I bet I would still be considered a thief.
Just like World of Goo 3 I did recieve my first copy through ‘questionable’ means, i’ll admit, but… after playing it for a while, I grinned and coughed up my $20 for the real thing. It was just that awesome and beautiful to play, and I felt a bit guilty the first time through after finding out it was made by such a small group of developers. Also, recommended it to a few friends, who also bought it later on 