My Software Is Being Pirated

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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 use terms like “own”, “property”, “pirate” etc. is very much to frame the conversation in ways that make the analogue to how people understand physical property.

You make my point for me: Since these concepts don’t map well to the concept of property, we only confuse and confound rational discussion if we cling to terms with entirely irrelevant baggage.

Ideas are not property, they don’t behave at all like property, the things people do with them are not at all like the things they do with property; and it is harmful to coherent discussion to continue using terms that imply those falsehoods.

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After reading this, I went and bought the game. Someone help these 2 guys out.

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  1. Have a great freaking product.
  2. Charge a fair price for it.

Amen to that!

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The problem isn’t just with software, any field that relies on IP suffers.

A film I made 2 years ago is finally being released now.

It has already been downloaded over 4 million times.

It’s not out in most of the world yet.

It cost $9M to shoot, $25M in total.

It makes film-making a waste of time.

It wasn’t even a stunning film :slight_smile:

The Mutant Chronicles

Geoff-Cinematographer

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The single most effective thing I’ve ever done to decrease piracy of our games was to build this simple webpage (and SEO it a bit):

http://sillysoft.net/warez/

Tracking shows plenty of people hit it and end up buying.

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Where I work we sell some of our software products commercially.

We moved to hardware dongles because we found some of our re-sellers have bough a single copy, then they sell that copy over and over to their customers. They pocket the money, we get nothing.

This is not piracy this is out-and-out theft, and probably fraud.

Extremely hard to do anything about it though. Hardware dongles are expensive but seem to be effective. Even then, I’m sure a well-versed cracker would bust that protection - eventually.

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The biggest kicker in this equation is world of goo is both fantastic and entirely DRM free.

These are the good guys. It’s a shame.

I’ve rambled on about just living with piracy in the past (http://www.davidwhitney.co.uk/content/blog/index.php/2008/09/30/protecting-your-software-authorisation-and-you/) however I always feel a little gutted when people stick it to the little guys.

If only it’d work on xbox live arcade as well as wii ware, but I just don’t see how it could be ported without being dumbed down or with really odd controls.

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OK. I am a longtime steam hater, but I checked out world of goo on Jeff’s advice. It’s not my kind of game, but I ended up purchasing two other games while I was looking around. One of them is decent (it works like it’s supposed to anyway) and came at a good price. The other was a fairly new MMO that worked once and has been a source of endless frustration since. Now I remember why I NEVER purchase software. Retailers and software producers alike have for years been pushing the idea down our throats that software, once purchased, cannot be returned for a refund. EVER. What happened to the old axiom the customer is always right? What happened to my rights to be satisfied with the product? Why does nobody ever mention this aspect of purchasing software when discussing piracy?

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World of Goo is actually the only game I pirated, but enjoyed it so much I ended up buying it anyway. The killer feature for me - besides the AWESOME game that it is? The no DRM of any kind feature. Yup. Had it not been that, I probably wouldn’t have bought it as I use many different computers, and ended up installing the game on many of them.

So if you did enjoy the game, consider buying it. It’s more than worth it :slight_smile:

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Part of the reason I buy so much on iTunes and Amazon is they already have my credit card details, so purchasing is easy.

Make it just as easy to buy your crap and I’ll buy it too.

I tried to buy Peggle from PopCap games the other day. The experience was so frustrating I gave up. I’m fairly sure pirating a copy would have been a hell of a lot easier. I didn’t pirate it though. Although I pirate stuff about 30% of the time nowadays. That figure was a lot higher when I was younger.

Though to be honest, as a developer who will inevitably sell some software crap to other people, I couldn’t care less about piracy providing I’m making enough money to get by. Perhaps I’m just not that greedy. Or full of my rights and everyone else’s injustice.

Also to be honest, I’ll pick a business model that works. IMO selling software doesn’t work anymore. I don’t think it ever did work to non-enterprise markets frankly. Bill figured that out early and locked all the vendors into forced sales contracts. Nice work Bill.

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I’ve been playing world of goo for a couple months

and I just bought it due to this article.

another great game from a small team is castle crashers

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The single most effective thing I’ve ever done to decrease piracy of our games was to build this simple webpage (and SEO it a bit): http://sillysoft.net/warez/

This is VERY VERY smart. Kudos to you, and I think more games devs should do this as well. Being the #1 search result for piracy says that you care about your product, and your customers (the ones who can be swayed, anyway) will notice that. Combats broken windows piracy.

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some of our re-sellers have bough a single copy, then they sell that copy over and over to their customers. They pocket the money, we get nothing.

This is not piracy this is out-and-out theft, and probably fraud.

It is neither theft, nor piracy, since both of those refer to physical property, and what your rogue re-sellers are doing has no connection to your physical property. If you invoke a misleading metaphor, you abandon rational discussion.

What you describe is copyright infringement. Please keep the terms clear so that discussion can be reasonable.

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@Dustin
give your approach another dimension - develop a crack for your game and spread it over the web. the crack would expire after 15 days when user is quite addictive to the software and more pushed to buy

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It’s great to see that people I admire have the same tastes as me; World of Goo is indeed a wonderful game (pre-ordered it btw), and it was chosen as RockPaperShotgun.com 's game of the year. I just hope the developers still received a fair compensation for their work which would allow them to continue producing such gems.

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@Usman Shaheen
Not sure I agree with your idea. Sounds like a strange implementation of Guerrilla Marketing… here are my of the top problems with this:

  1. by doing so you would invite people who probably would never buy your product in the first place
  2. you potentially can alienate people that would be your customers
  3. I am not a lawyer but would question a legality of distributing something as a crack

So, why not use licensing and create evaluation that would expire after 15 days…

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I would agree with 90% piracy as well. We sell to educational software fortune 5000, governments and schools. We raised money then invested almost a million of dollars in our software and marketing then had to lay off almost all of our employees (9 out of 11) because multi-billion dollar companies bought one license for $300 and shared it with all of their employees. Since we sell training software even at $300 per person we are saving our customers over $1200 per person compared to classroom training not to mention travel. It would be nice to charge less but our potential market is in the low in the thousands. We tried selling some popular titles in the $39.95 but actually lost money on them.

No matter how tight you crank the licensing, they’ll find a way. Citrix is a great way, load one copy on the citrix server and share it with everyone or load it on a notebook and pass it around or common area machine you name it they find a way to break it.

When we surveyed our customers, we got a 99% customer satisfaction they love our products but not enough to buy one for each person.

It’s frustrating for the 10% who were honest.

I do feel even worse for you game developers who have supply chains and only make a few dollars per copy sold. Kids think you get the full $49 but with licensing fees, wholesalers, distribution, packaging, shipping, retailers not to mention your large staffs, there is very little left at the end.

Piracy is a violation of international copyright law and is a felony, if you are going to steal software you might as well jack some cars or rob the corner store it’s not much different. Although for now the chances of getting caught are pretty slim. The BSA (bsa.org) offers a $1,000,000 reward for piracy leads. Accidental license misuse is a $150,000 fine per occurrence and intentional license abuse is a $250,000 fine per occurrence.

If you know anyone who is ripping off software let the bsa.org know and get your 10% reward.

according to the BSA:
What is Software Piracy ?

Software piracy is the unauthorized copying or distribution of copyrighted software. This can be done by copying, downloading, sharing, selling, or installing multiple copies onto personal or work computers. What a lot of people don’t realize or don’t think about is that when you purchase software, you are actually purchasing a license to use it, not the actual software. That license is what tells you how many times you can install the software, so it’s important to read it. If you make more copies of the software than the license permits, you are pirating.

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Last (maybe).

Someone else blogged about Zombies today: http://tinyurl.com/8b7enh

Its one thing for a zombie-making manager (ZMM) to take this to heart (ZMM to-do’s: Get a heart) but what about those who are being zombified, especially in a tight market?

A positive attitude will help a lot. Yesterday and today, Joyce Meyer interviewed Dr. Leaf, a brain researcher, on her show. Dr. Leaf explained how memories are basically stored as negatives or positives. The negative thoughts actually release fear-related chemicals everytime their accessed with cause something like 85% of diseases. The positive ones actually release chemicals that bring healing to your body.

Being zombified could definately be taken as a negative. Some of the steps to take are:

  1. Forgive your manager.
  2. Repent for your own bad attitudes, words, actions, etc. That means to acknowledge your wrongs and be sorry for them. As long as you maintain an I was justified or I deserve attitude, you maintain the negative thoughts.
  3. See were you can improve your performance, by being more proactive or education
  4. Realize that you have gifts abilities others don’t. Look for opportunities to bring those out more.

Lastly, realize what you really deserve. Someday, you’ll stand before God. Do you really want what your deserve or do you want mercy?

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World of goo is too short and simple for 20$.
Aquaria is a hundred times more complicated and costs 30$.

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The worst thing a business can have is someone else’s source code, they want a product that works and support that goes with it.
Yep, that is why there is Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Without it, open source would never have been so successful.
Here’s the source code is a virtual ‘F*ck You letter’.
Yep, when Netscape died (which is another mess altogether, basically they tried to make money from it’s web browser, then MS came in and made it’s browser free, repeat for web servers), they made it open source as Mozilla. After that, Phoenix was started, which was then renamed to Firebird, then Firefox, which gained a lot of popularity and is now a very common browser.
Java as a fat client, puhlease! Java bloatware in the middle tier (you have to cluster because no single system will stay running very long). Java databases spare me.
Yep, the most common use for Java was Java applets in the browser. MS responded, BTW, with .NET.