First off when I get a CD with a card with the reg key written on it, I grab a sharpie and copy the key to the printed side of the disc so it stays with the software.
Also some of those numbers may be in error, if you work for a large installation and have 80 computers to install you are probably going to make a master image from a completely installed system and then duplicate it to the others hard drives. While the co. may have the 80 license keys it is not practical to individually install each program on the computers.
Licensing of expensive software has lately turned me towards open source alternatives. Case in point was Adobe had a great little web page program, PageMill, about $50 to $100 and capable of painlessly maintaining a basic web site. Now all they have to sell is this over-powered dreamweaver or even more so - the creative web suite. Komozer/NVU is a good alternative (if only they would behave with PHP files.)
I think a lot of the companies have the mentality that they can never reduce prices significantly and then alienate the introductory user by positioning their products out of their price range. How much would you pay for software you never tried before - better yet, how much would you pay for software don’t know how to use?
OK, I just have to point out that the best C++ compiler I’ve used requires no registration or access key – it’s gcc. Same for the best dynamic language, Python. Why pay Microsoft and put up with the aggravation?
Licence Keys - are just a another legitimate customer annoyance feature
There are two models for selling software
Here is some software you pay for it by buying a licence
Here is some software pay for updates/support
If your software licence does not cost enough to warrant the hassle people will pirate it because it’s easier (people will also pirate expensive software but that’s because it’s expensive)
But you need something to protect your investment that does not annoy your customers (just the pirates)
Dongles annoy customers
Typing in long licence keys annoy customers
Retyping long licence keys when moving PC’s annoy customers
The cut and paste and click here to activate system work just fine and I suspect are no more secure if you are careful?
I know it’s not the primary focus of the article, but I’ve always had a problem with the BSA’s piracy statistics. Have you ever looked at their methodology? They take hardware sales, figure out what they expect software sales to be, based on a model of software use within a given country; then take the retail value of the expected software sale minus actual sales. Voila: piracy!
I’d be interested to hear why more software shops that sell online don’t go with the license file approach instead of serial numbers? I have used XHeo licensing (www.xheo.com) and it works pretty well.
After purcahse the publisher supplies a download link to a customer specific license file. The customer just saves it to the application install folder. The publisher usually saves the customer license information so it can be downloaded again if the customer needs it.
“I’ll choose biased data over no data whatsoever, every time.”
is a foolish credo. Good data is better than no data, which is infinitely better than bad data. Bad data leads one to make erroneous conclusions. No data makes one seek good data to draw scientifically accurate conclusions.
Please, Jeff, never use bad data for anything other than motivation to find good data!
I bet even in the days of Altair BASIC Gates was grossly overpricing his software. It’s funny reading about Bill Gates wondering who would provide professional quality software for free while I’m using Firefox in lieu of his wonderful “professional quality” IE. It’s also funny that, despite this rampant, evil piracy, Gates is one of the richest men on the planet.
I’m so tired of hearing how piracy is bad, you’re stealing, blah blah blah blah, but the people doing the complaining are making MILLIONS. What’s wrong with this picture? Maybe, instead of pointing your finger at all of us peons, you should take a look at your friggin pricing scheme and wonder if you might be a charging a little too much. $15 for a CD that took less than $1 to create? Are you telling me that the other $14 is for “creative property” and studio time? Hardly. $110 for the most BASIC OEM version of your poorly designed OS? Why? For the hundreds of features you put in that the average user will never touch? And, of course, these prices have to go up with newer versions, because they are increasing in quality.
“On the other hand, copy protection schemes DO scare away honest users.”
I paid for a copy of Pro Tools LE (audio recording software) and have been using it as a hobbyist - until I changed a hard drive in my computer. Now one of my plugins (“Amplitube”) insists that it’s been stolen, and proceeds to launch a registration dialog that doesn’t work, freezing the entire program. Moreover, the Amplitube website won’t give me another key.
The prospect of re-installing my whole Pro Tools system and having to re-register all of my plugins, falling into God knows what other traps along the way, sounds so terrible that I haven’t touched Pro Tools in months.
“Personally, I am really tired of games that nag me to find the CD, windows that nags me to install WGA or to activate, and software that nags me to find the license key.”
Lately I just don’t install anything that requires WGA. I’m tired of playing that game. It’s insulting, and I’m not entirely comfortable with Microsoft calling home with my information.
"avoid paying (note that I did not say “steal”)"
Yeah, what’s the difference again?
The difference is that when something is really stolen, the original possessor no longer has it. It was pretty much a Bill Gates “innovation” to mis-apply the term to copying software.
The legal wedge used to deter copying software (in the US anyway) is US copyright law. Copyright is really nothing other than a government-granted monopoly on copying a work. In the eyes of the law, no one owns the work itself. So all software “piracy” really amounts to is a violation of some company’s government-backed copying monopoly.
Copyright was intended to be an industrial regulation. Until very recently violations of it were considered civil matters (whereas theft would be a criminal matter). Its the big copyright holders who want you to think of it as a nasty criminal activity by using loaded (and inaccurate) words like “piracy” and “theft”.
Probably the best term I have heard for it is “unauthorised copying”, but I’ll admit it doesn’t have a lot of pizzaz.
I do think the service model offers a lot more rosy picture than the current way. And with web services becoming more and more prominent/feasible, maybe the time is right. I’m not an economist but it seems to make sense to let people pirate the software if they want; charge for services.
Point the first:
I have to disagree with Jeff regarding the use of biased data. Biased data cannot be trusted. A scientist wouldn’t use biased data because it presents a skewed view of the results. We want to be objective, not biased. In this case, unbiased data is preferable to biased data, and that renders no data the better choice.
Point the second:
To all the posters claiming that the lower piracy rate on Vista is due to its lower sales rate: get real. When these figures are calculated, they are calculated as a percentage of the sales rate. Thus, if the number of copies of Vista that are out there that are pirated is half of what the number of XP copies are that are pirated, that’s a ratio and not the total number of copies. It’s not a 1:1 correlation.
Point the third:
Linux is not a silver bullet. Mac is not a silver bullet. Windows is not a silver bullet. No one operating system is going to solve the software registration problem because the operating system is not the problem. Software registration is the problem. It’s not an OS problem. It’s something we, as developers, have historically handled badly. There are a plethora of solutions out there, some good, some bad, none perfect. If there was a perfect solution out there, it would likely have been universally adopted by now.
I was so disappointed that “Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego” wasn’t designed around using the Almanac to play the game rather than it just being a lame copy-protection scheme.
If software piracy is a crime, I believe it would either be copyright violation or breach of contract. Except that—if I recall correctly—breach of contract is technically not a “crime” but a “civil offense”.
“Unless you provide some disincentives, that’s exactly what people will do-- they’ll pay nothing for your software.”
This statement is a bit odd in an article that otherwise seems to recognize that this isn’t an issue of absolutes. Registration keys won’t stop all pirates from pirating; the lack of registration keys won’t stop all honest customers from paying.
Also, don’t forget that even without some anti-piracy scheme, copyright law itself still serves as a disincentive.
“Products with serial numbers get pirated at a lower level than products without, even if it’s easy to fake the serial number.”
But the important questions are:
Do products with serial numbers sell more than products without? Does the extra revenue cover the costs of the anti-piracy scheme?
There’s little point in trying to prevent piracy if it doesn’t result in higher profits.
On the bit of checking for valid data as you enter it:
It would be quite possible to add a simple checksum to each block. This wouldn’t be of any help to the guy trying to brute-force it because just because it passed the checksum wouldn’t mean it’s valid. It would be a big help in reducing the hunt for the error when the system doesn’t take the key, though.
The worst experience I ever had with registration keys was the opposite of the normal ones, though: The game took an invalid key! It was a case of a bad font and both I and 1 were legal. I got it wrong, the game was happy–but the updater wouldn’t work because the website did know the key was no good. Uninstall/Reinstall.
Activation keys don’t work. I’ve installed tons of pirated software with keys: only cracks or keygens were necessary. The only stuff that can crack piracy are those online games with CD keys. Now, who will crack these???
I think it would be cool if some software company parsed their key into some form of picture that we could reproduce. Something as simple as 3 rows of 7 blocks 12 to 15 of which should be filled with 7 distinct colors (these could be in the form of block placed under the key which the user can drag). This method would give us 4 quadrillion (pidgin hole: 75 million) with 12 unique blocks and 25 quadrillion (pidgin hole: 600 million) with 15 unique blocks. Granted, with this method you could not copy-n-paste, but its fast enough that I don’t think users would mind putting it in every time, and it should be really easy for someone to see a mistake (and hard to make a mistake in the first place).