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College Students Are Buying More, Warez-ing Less
Keefesis writes: "This story from a researcher at the University of Florida states that software piracy among college students dropped between the 1996-97 school year and the 2000-01 school year. One reason cited is that software makers have found 'creative' ways to entice students to purchase software(rather than the heavy-handed and largely unsuccessful tactics of the RIAA)."
Maybe because the 96-97 crop of students are industry now, and know what it's like to have to purchase software and what makes the purchase worthwhile to students.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
A lot of students that I know consider software perchase just like a book expense. If they are taking a Flash course, they buy the software. If they are taking a design course, they buy Photoshop, both at Educational prices. Other things like Matlab or AutoCad or Pro/E are definitly educational purchases as well.
but i graduated in 97, with me out of the scene, i wouldn't be surprised at all if the numbers dropped drastically.
what do i do now? i write commercial software. do i feel guilty about warezing in the past? no. i didn't have the money then, i do now. am i mad at people warezing my software now? no. it is an understanding i guess...
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
A lot of companies are no realising that people stick with what they know. Give a student a discount on your software and when they go on to ear big bucks they will buy the retail versions. (Hello calling macromedia)
I can't actually think of a single person I know who has a legal copy of anything above windows 95. No one bothers. Same with application software.
There isn't a bit of guilt about it either. You don't even contemplate buying it. If it's obscure software, then you have to ask around a little, but it's no hassle.
Your payment - you copy it and pass it round more.
The more you steal, the less you admit?
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
I wonder how this is affected by students purchasing software for friends and family?
I'm always bugging my sister-in-law to get me software - usually at deep educational discounts.
Up until a year ago I warezed all my software(for Windows). Now, programs and games are becoming so sophisticated that it is useless to pirate something becasue you lose so many of the features that are included on the CD.
Every once in a while I will warez a program or game to try it out, and then if I like it I'll definitely go pay for it - having the CD and all the material that comes with the app. is worth the money.
~.Evanrude
One thing that I noticed while I was in school (1995-2001) was a large increase in the number of people using free software (especially Linux). Also, in 1999 my school started a deal with MS to provide "educational" versions of their software to students. Its much easier to walk over to the computer lab and borrow a legal copy of windows (or VS, etc.) than it is to download a copy, especially with the increase of monitoring on the dorm networks.
What the hell does the RIAA and MPAA think kids are made of money? A single software program I might use for a 10 hours a week for a year or more. Can't say that about anything they push. All I listen to are indie bands and noise generators.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
It used to be that only the hackers were playing around with computers, and for them pirating presented no significant technical hurdles. Now everyone and his sister is using a computer, and they're far more likely to just go out and buy their OS, office and a couple of games to go with this nice shiny computer mom and dad bought them.
The computer nerds are probably copying just as much, its just that the nerds with computers are a smaller ratio of the user population every day.
...is to use an OS the encourages the use of Free software. Since I've been using Linux and FreeBSD at home I've never been tempted (or had the need) to find warez.
For one thing, software makers now commonly make agreements with computer manufacturers to "bundle" software with new computers -- in effect, selling it when the computer is sold.
How can the music/movie industry do the same thing? Do you get a free copy of Staind's latest album with a free copy of "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" when you buy a computer?
It just makes a lot more sense in the case of software.
...college students tell administrators they are all going to sleep at 9:30 pm and saying NO to alcohol, too! And that joint on the dresser was their roommate's, they swear.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
"They focused on college students because, as a group, they tend to be technologically savvy, have low disposable incomes and often need costly specialized software for technical education classes - all of which seem to add to the appeal of piracy. Chiang and Assane believed if they could get a handle on the scale of the problem among college students, it likely would represent the worst it gets among the general population."
Hey I left school in 98 and I'm still friggin broke! No where near what I was in col but hey broke is broke. And what is this about college students being the worst case. I don't buy that. I know that when we were in college we pirated games and stuff but hell I know people now who will pirate anything just cuz they can get their hands on it.
We put all of our pirated and cracked games on the CS lab computers and would play WarCraft2, Starcraft, Hex, and Duke Nukem. I still remember yelling across the lab at my friends with a giant chicken egg loaded up ready to go. "I'm gonna get you Mutha F***er".
Ah the days.
If I were only smart enough to accomplish the things I dream about.. Or maybe too dumb to care.
They had the same academic pricing on software in 1996. Note that students admit less to using warez, does not mean that they are using less warez. I think with the rise of broadband, and wiring dorm room, this has to be wrong. Maybe the students got smarter and are now not admiting to commiting crimes.
Outtasight, daddy-o. Me'n the droogs are gonna rumble the 'frames, try to shake down some code. Can you dig it?
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
They claim that their are new ways to get students to purchase software, but they only speak of educational discounts and bundling. these arent creative, or are they new. The college i went to was a haven of trading and warez. Even today, i pay for as little as i can, and rely on astalavista.box.sk to provide the rest. As far as software being cheaper? has anyone here purchased xp? (i know naughty word, tsk tsk), or what about the new wolfenstein, or max payne. Games are still 50, apps are still around 100, and thats the way it will be for a long time to come. I think that with the collapse of napster that trading and swapping has scattered so wide that its harder to accuratly measure its effect. Edonkey, kazaa, gnutella, direct connect, ftp, newsgroups....come on. you can find anything you want for free, and in less then 10 mins. regardless of who is trading what where, the article is still inaccurate and i think a mindless piece of fluff that i used to call an "evergreen" when i wrote for student papers.
"Once upon a time men were lions and machines were mice, but since it was so long ago, now its twice upon a time."
Well, golly-gee. I started college in 1996, and finished in 2000, that right there explains all of the reported fluctuations in software piracy by college students right there!
Oops...
-ShelbyCobra
Living life in the right side of the s-plane
Could OSS and other free software being at the level it is now be a factor?
There is a free alternative to almost every commercial software package out there now. This wasn't as much the case back then. I know if there is a free software package that is viable against that of its commercial equivalent I'll use it in a minute.
If a piece of software is going to be used by me daily I consider buying it. Otherwise I copy it.
What sense is there in me buying Windows when I only use it on a laptop for my gf and for playing MP3s? What sense is there for me to pay $10 for the Office CD from school and only be able to install it twice (and have to keep that long number on record) when I can use a Warez'd copy that has no license?
I use Linux solely on my computer and I use only programs that I can get for free (WP, etc) but on computers that require Windows I rarely pay for software.
Sorry, I just don't have the money to be buying shit. If other college students do, they must have Free Beer.
Companies can succeed by selling service rather than software. It's the extras on the CD, the nifty stuff on the DVD, the nice documentation that makes the difference. And the students know it.
Mmmmmmm. Floor pie!
It looks like software sellers have awakened to the notion that getting a little money from a lot of students is better than getting nothing from a lot of students. The students may remember the favor done to their college-era budgets and buy software legally when they move on. Smart move.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
Here at the University of Texas they have some massive discounts going on. Office XP can be had for 15 bucks and Windows XP for a mere 5, both from the student store. I guess that's one way to combat piracty: forego profit.
...software piracy among college students dropped between the 1996-97 school year and the 2000-01 school year. One reason cited is that software makers have found 'creative' ways to entice students to purchase software.
;-)
:: One Website To Rule Them All
creative
1. Setting up bogus honeypot websites like Amazon and CDNow in order to steal credit card numbers.
2. Hiring cute college girls to seduce rich undergrads into buying tons of software
3. Sending one new copy of their product to boxes #1-8430 of every college in Pennsylvania on a monthly basis. If they don't stamp the card with "CANCEL" and send it back within 16 hours, send them a bill for the software. If they don't pay the bill for the software within 36 hours, send them more software along with an overdue notice. Repeat.
4. See SSSCA
monolinux.com
There are only a few software packages that most students would ever contemplate using ... say, the OS, an office suite, and a few specific analysis packages tailored specifically for courses. Since most software companies make most of their money off industrial users, it makes sense to tailor cheap licenses for student software users. Modern packages also tend to be large, in the hundreds of megabytes -- even with university bandwidth that's not trivial, especially if your rez has capacity limits.
By contrast, there are hundreds of songs that the average student would be interested in downloading, and students are one of the more lucrative demographics for music companies. Most songs are a few megabytes at most, making them incredibly easy to download and share. The "creative solutions" proposed for software probably won't translate well into music piracy ...
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1 word: Straw-fucking-man.
I really hope I'm just feeding a troll, but here goes: if you take someone's Ferrari, you're depriving them of its use. If you copy someone's software ... you've got a copy. No one loses if you couldn't afford it / wouldn't have bought it anyhow. It doesn't make it legal, of course, but please don't say that piracy (always) damages the software house. (I would reckon the number of people who pirate software that they would have bought if not for warez is pretty small.)
Does this report take into account the use of free software among students? Maybe students don't need to pirate XP/Office/Photoshop/etc. because they're using Linux/StarOffice/Gimp/etc.
This just proves that piracy is GOOD for consumers.
Piracy is really just another form of competition -- whine about it being "unfair" or not. Piracy offers the base product at no price.
Thus, producers are forced to lower their prices in order to compete and offer other benefits or increase the value of other benefits already offered (such as making customer support better). Those producers that arrogantly think the approach to piracy si to raise the price of products eventually find out that such only pushes more people to piracy.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
"In that survey, of about 700 students, Chiang and Assane found the number of students using pirated software dropped to about 40 percent, Chiang said, a 25 percent decline. The dip is all the more significant researchers, pointed out, because it occurred at a time when both the amount of software and students' use of computers increased considerably." Or it's possible that these students are following the recent copyright/piracy debates closely and are worried about getting caught, so more people are lying about what they're ripping off than in 1996. Hell, if someone came up to me and said "Hey, this is for a 'survey' - do you pirate software?" I'd lie. I mean, have you seen the microsoft piracy scare ads?
Triv
This is a very small sampling of students, and from only one school. Too small to get reliable statistics from.
in 1996-1997 the researchers found 53 percent...
and in 2001: dropped to about 40 percent, Chiang said, a 25 percent decline
PLEASE explain to me how 53-25=40. Something is HORRIBLY wrong with this story!
What the hell does the RIAA and MPAA think kids are made of money?
What are you talking about? Kids sure buy a lot of CDs and watch a lot of movies. Nobody complained about the RIAA or MPAA before MP3s came along.
Students aren't pirating as much now because more of them are using open source software than in 1997. How many knew about open source software back then. I was still using OS/2 Warp myself.
I'm surprised they haven't been doing this earlier. It doesn't take rocket science to figure out that you're more likely to make money by giving people something they want than by trying to take things away from them.
One would think that business would understand that if you want people to buy your products as opposed to copy them, you need to make them want to buy your products. You have to offer something that makes people feel they get something more for spending their money than they would from simply copying the products.
All this copy-protection and legislation is the wrong approach. If they want to fight it, they should fight it by offering things you can't get from copying so people will want to buy the "official" product. Cracking down on people and introducing copy protection schemes that hinder their ability to make legal copies (i.e. backups and similar things) just makes them resent you.
This new strategy has the advantage of encouraging purchases and gaining support from the user community, so I think it's probably a good thing.
I think the whole issue of ownership of something tangible is given short shrift by just about everyone from the warez-ers to the RIAA. It feels good to own good stuff.
The problem faced by the software community is that consumers make their own decisions about how much that's worth. For university students, it's not worth much. They won't pay retail for Office, Mathematica, SPSS, or AutoCad. But if you lower the price enough, they'll buy it. That's what this study is showing.
The other side of the card is that lowering the value of ownership is going to get producers into trouble in a big hurry. Troublesome copy protection on audio CDs that prevents legitimate ripping and OEM OS "restore" CDs instead of full copies are examples. Here they are degrading the ownership value, and that's bad.
Carrots work better than sticks, and choice works better than either.
Careers should combine three things: what you can do, what you want to do, and what you can get paid for.
I don't blame the students.. Warez probably has dropped since there are so many "free" versions of software out because of open sourceing. The other software companies have to do something to compete with that. Otherwise, its back to Usenet, or go hang out in the computer lab looking to make new "friends".
thelikesofwhich.com
"In the last couple of years, the piracy problem on campuses has switched from software to music, Chiang said. As students get access to ever-increasing bandwidth, movie piracy also is likely to become common, he predicted."
This is such a joke. This guy may be out doing research, but he's way behind the times. Movie piracy has been going on for years on college campuses. What a D-bag.
This data is not very accurate at all! Look at the amount of people they interviewed: 148 in the previous survey and 700 in the next?
They don't even say that they conducted them the same way! The way they conduct the survey could get the trust of the person, or not, which would change the results of the poll, as it is based on the amount of people who admitted to using warez
As an example let me talk a little about Trolltechs approach with Qt and Borlands approach with JBuilder In both these cases I as an end-user get access to a good product that I can try out and build my own opinion of, not influenced by marketing hype.
If I like the products, I'll be more inclined towards using them in a production enviroment, and I'll gladly buy The Product (pun intended).
On the other hand, if I don't have a chance to try out a companies products before I buy them, or if I am forced to withstand outrageous license agreements, phone-home "features" or Digital Rights Management then that company can forget to have me as a customer. I'll get something else...
... and finding good warez can be difficult. I'm a CISE student at UF, and I guarantee you there is mad piracy going on at UF among CS students. It's probably more a matter of most students not having the ability to get good pirated software. This is not a moral decision among our nations future leaders, this is frustration at not having the cut-scenes, not being able to play online with your best friend who went to college elsewhere, and not wanting to sort through 4E99 pop under porn windows.
These companies are still making far less money from students than they would from a same-sized population of other computer users. The reason students in particular pirate software is because it's stupendously easy to break the "laws" of supply and demand, simply because the supply of any given program is practically infinite. Since I MUST have Matlab in order to complete my degree plan (my work schedule is such that I can not spend hours on end at the school computer labs), if the software is not priced affordably, I WILL pirate it.
The sooner these software companies stop worrying about how many theoretical sales they "lose" to piracy, and start pricing their packages attractively to EVERYBODY (not just students), the better.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I think this is the future of all content. Realize that piracy is a given. Make piracy just hard enough that not everyone can do it, and create a tiered pricing structure with incentives for upgrade. Chances are that current 'student discount' sales are going to lead to future full price sales as a person's income and responsibilities increase.
The same model can also apply to other digital content. Sell crappy MP3 for cheap on the web, the CD costs more, the DVD audio version even more. Allow people to pay what they can and exchange lower quality/convenience for lower prices, instead of trying to lock your content behind steel bars with one fixed price.
-josh
First the number of software users shot up dramatically. Paritally because of the tech boom, partially because computer use wasn't confined to 'leet CS and engineering geeks. With that, the average ability to locate warez, cracks, or to crack themselves dropped, just like internet users at that time (what year did the "endless September" arrive?). BBS's and USENET, both major warez mediums, while still there, are not used by the common computer user anymore.
Plus, all the wealth in the late 90's made it easier for Jr. in college to ask Daddy for the several hundred $ for MS Office.
I'm sure the student discounts help -- a little. But that might be artifically skewing the results. Having been an student and an employee for a university, I know it's not uncommon for both to purchase that $100 copy of Adobe Photoshop for the guy next door, who would otherwise need to pay $700 (or whatever it is now). It does prove that a better price will sell better, though.
Method of processing duck feet
I'm buying a distro here and there (pay the developers for their time), and get the rest of my software (legally) for free.
Before, I'd copy windows, copy corel, copy everything. Now that I get my software for free, I'm willing to 'give back'.
-Ben
I checked my school's CIS web site and signed up for the MS introduction of .NET studio, when I go I will get a "gift pack" with Windows XP pro, Visual Studio and other assorted item "of value". I can't wait to see what I get... I'm taking my laptop so I try it all out while they are talking. Back to my point, my school (Georgia State BTW) hosts tons of these things, and if you know where to look you can get a bunch of free software... and no befor you ask it not usually criple ware.
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Research shows that if music/software was cheaper more people would buy them instead of downloading illegal copies. It's quite a hassle to find and download warez, plus the fact that you don't get any support on teh stuff. As a student, usually your economy is very strained as it is and therefore warezing might seem like a temporary solution since not every company make edu-versions of their programs. Hopefully more companies will realize that if they lower their prices they'll make more money since more people will buy. That means that more people get to evaluate their programs = free feedback.
rxvt, suse, vi, solaris, debian, java, c, feel the love. #unix@IRCnet, #gimp & #gnome@GIMPnet
Here at our college Microsoft has done a ton to get their software into more and more PCs. In the next couple of weeks Windows XP Professional which typically retails for what $199 or $299 will be on sale for under $20. It's not crippled or marked as "Academic" or anything. All you have to show is a valid student ID. Same thing with Visual Studio .NET (although we were one of the launch partners so I picked up a copy of XP Professional and .NET for free anyway).
:)
Makes a ton of sense; there's also Photoshop, OS X, etc. all at great prices. Personally, if I can purchase the software for a wallet-friendly price I'm going to do so. It's awesome software that I don't mind shelling out $15 to help out in their efforts. $15 is greater than zero!
Thanks,
--
Matt
College students will always have a dangerous amount of two things, at least to folks like the RIAA and the MPAA:
1. Lack of spending money
2. Time
These two compounding factors are why students "pirate". Not that I'm advocating it, but if you could spend the afternoon downloading 3 albums (instead of watching TV) and then you're able to go out and drink that night because of the 50 bucks you just "saved" not buying those CDs, the fomer option looks pretty attractive to you compared to the latter.
----- rL
dorms have begun to throttle bandwidth making it a pain in the ass to download something like visual studio. open up the pipes and watch sales drop.
If I could get Visual Studio for $25 or whatever insane pricing they get, I'd buy too!
Might be worth going back to school just for the discount
actually, when they attempted to ban vhs copying people did complain. now that they are attempting to do that same thing with cd's and dvd's is it any surprise that people are complaining again? the complaints are perfectly legitimate.
I'd venture to guess that this is because of bandwidth lockdown and most institutions. At the small, private college where I work our 6mbps guaranteed bandwidth was showing spikes up to 33mbps at peak times before they finally blocked all P2P file sharing. When your means of pirating are taken away, what else can you do but buy what you need?
example, 3D Studio MAX.. thats some pricey software for just being a hobbie of mine. I wish they would come out with a free or "lite" version of it.
By the time I left college in '98 the computer labs around campus were being filled with high end machines with all kinds of software available for everyone to use. Plus the dorms had been wired where you could log on to a network and use all the apps. There was no longer any need to steal apps because they were so easy to use legitimately. Of course games and the such were still copied. Could this account for some of the drop?
I recently graduated from UF. I don't recall seeing a non-warezed copy of MATLAB in all my time there, despite it being licensed by the University for use on all lab machines. One factor which may play a part in the decrease of warez is the increased availability of free software. Guys I know who would have warezed Photoshop in a heartbeat now just use Gimp. Same goes for Office (now people are using StarOffice).
Shockwave Flash movies are the greatest thing to happen to non-sequitur humor since Japan.
When I was in school I can't remember that last time I pirated a copy of Linux, gez maybe that's because it's reasonably priced for students as well as professionals. Now I'm not saying all software should be free, but back in the day it wasn't worth it to pay a hundred dollars to M$ for a piece of software the blue screened more often than not. Same went for Mathmatica.
Think about it for a moment... how many college students would have had computers in 1996/1997? 50 percent? 65 percent? How many students have computers now? Almost everyone. But alas Slashdot, why is warezing going down?!?!
The small number of students who had computers in '96/97 were most likely students who were familiar with technology and aware of such things like w4r3z. The students who have since purchased computers are less likely to be familiar with software piracy. They know nothing beyond Best Buy and/or Future Shop.
I don't think software piracy is going down... I think that the students who have purchased computers in the interim are unaware of warez.
Here goes my Karma, but if this gets fixed its worth it.
I BOUGHT (supported them) Red Hat 7.0 a few months back. I had it installed on a laptop after several days of reading trying and reading some more. I finally bought a low end PC to play with it on. Bottom line is I have a dlink DFE-530TX+ NIC in the box. It did not detect it and I am having trouble figuring out the install of it.
Can anyone please contact me that is willing to help?
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Razzious Domini
I could be a GREAT KARMA WHORE if I could just shed the few morals I have left.
the earlier survey was of 148 people, the later one of 700 people. That poorly justifies what anyone is pirating or buying. If you want more accurate figures, the survey should have been either
a) of a much larger control group (the same control group used for each survey) or
b) of a specific piece of software tracked.
If not, the numbers and conclusion are unimpressive to me, just interesting.
"i can never say no to anyone but you"
College kids are sick of being broke and want to make some money when they graduate!
My own personal attitude on this one is that if I get significant use of a bit of commercial software, I'll buy it as a donation to the programmers. It's a token of appreciation, and a way to help them make more good programs. So for me, buying a game from Blizzard serves the same purpose as donating to FSF.
The difference between software and many other products is that it can be duplicated at incredibly low costs. If Alice gets a copy of the latest version of Quake from Bob, it has cost Bob hardly anything. Instead of selling hundreds of Hitchhiker's Guides, software is equivalent to selling 1 Hitchhiker's Guide hundreds of times.
I am officially gone from
Just wait till they have to start paying back those student loans that they used to buy the software--they'll be warezing their underwear.
c-hack.com |
I mean, come one! Does anyone believe this garbage?
If the study was comparing the piracy among students in the 96-97 school year and those same people today, you would have a point. However, it is comparing the students in the 96-97 school year and the students now, which in most cases are different people.
The point is that something has changed on campuses. Obviously, the people are different. But also, either the values or the software that they're using is different, too. Or the study is flawed, which wouldn't surprise me.
At the community college I work at I've noticed that students tend to have access to the software they want at open-access labs, and hence often don't need to buy it anyway.
Other methods for obtaining "free" software include using demonstration versions, or a friend's system that already has it.
Software and books for education are still way too expensive, so when you pay $200 for a class including lab/equipment fees you shouldn't expect to have to pay that much again in software costs.
Honestly, Microsoft have a better idea of it for their certificate training courses - you can get eval versions of their OSes that work for about 180 days, more than enough time to take a semester long course at a college, and sit the repeat exams..
Which of our favorite monopolies do you think will use this study to say that bundling provides customer benefit?
Am I off my rocker? Is there another way to interpret this that doesn't say that bundling provides customer benefit? Is this an endorsement of Microsoft's biz practices?
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
A survey of 148 slashdotters revealed that the percentage of them who could actually count dropped from 53% in 1996 to 40% in 2001, a drop with 13%...
It may be that a lot of college student such as my self and most of my friends are now useing OSS and dont feel need to pirate anything.
---
When I was at Purdue we could get most Microsoft software from the copy center for $5 a pop. That included office, all forms of the OS's etc. It's always nicer to have a license and a copy of the CD then something you grabbed from Kazaa. So at that price point it made alot of sense to buy it.
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I was in college in '96-'97 and yeah, I was into warez a little. Especially Photoshop and MS Office. But I didn't know about Linux then, either, I thought this was the only way to do it. I wonder how aware college students are of free apps like the Gimp and K-office and if using them has reduced the rate of piracy. I know Linux only has a 1% market share for home use but it has to be somewhat higher at colleges, right? And tech-savvy college kids are the ones most into warez.
At first glance I see this as a case of people not telling the truth about the software they own. But in fact the warez scene has seemed to have changed a bit in the last few years. The scene has slowly moved farther and farther away from the rip scene, and closer to the ISO scene. In addition, the old limits on release sizes have drastically changed with many 4 disk iso's actually trickling down to lesser sites. This huge increase in release size and program bloating (games and apps) has pretty much hindered any chance of getting warez if you are on a slower connection. How does this affect college students? Well for the most part, most college students who get warez are not in any coury or release groups and rely on smaller sites to get their warez, and these sites typically cater to the majority of its users who for the most part aren't those college students, but those at home with there overcrowded cable modems, dsl, or even 56k modems. Also affecting the decline (games specifically), it is getting to be a pain in the ass to get a good working multiplayer game via warez because many of the newer games are requiring some form of registration to play online.
Except for things like M$ stuff, I've noticed a nice decline in prices for certain things. That has induced me to buy lots of stuff because I think the price is fair.
All too often software companies (used to) charge way more than what the product was worth. It's not perfect, but I think companies are realizing this and pricing their stuff more appropriately.
If software is reasonably priced enough not to make the average person determined to steal it, then the software producers still win, even if they take a reduced margin because their sales were through OEM.
I've often wondered when warezing would finally become something that is actually disdained by the mainstream, rather than implicitly supported. It looks like we may finally be arriving there.
You know, the strange thing is that I think that computer games were the leader here. They're the ones that pioneer new distribution and pricing models.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
...Ass
Blarf.
This just shows that more students can afford software.
Why should I have to steal Adobe Photoshop when I've got 2 hours between classes and the campus library has a zip drive and a decent computer for me to use? This is especially true for students who only need the software for one term.
Finally, you simply can't rely too heavily on statistics in general, but especially on surveys.
"Sure thing. I pirate all my software and all my friends software. When I run out of things to pirate, I start pirating my pirated stuff...oh, wait -- did you say something about 'law'...er...I mean I borrowed my friend's CD once, but I gave it back. That's legal right?"
Interesting article - a little to light on the "facts" and the background information to believe blindly though.
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
Packages we use where I am employed that cost ~$500 go for ~$100 to students. And it wouldn't surprise me if more students pooled their funds to split the cost. I.e. 4 students in a house buy one copy at the educational discount of $100 @ $25 each.
But my feeling is that more people would actually buy the software if it wasn't so expensive to begin with.
Take console video games, for example. The average price of a new game is $50. If the games were $35.. I'd honestly gamble and buy more games because they cost less.
I don't think anti-piracy measures make a whole lot of difference because they can ALWAYS be broken.
Is it any wonder?
A few years ago, I owned a computer store, in my college town. I was routinely asked by many of my student Clientelle how much a copy of WinXX was. when I replied with my near $100 price (dictated by the $70-something OEM price wholesale) I heard snickers and exclamations about price gouging...
I never understood this, as I'd called local retailers and found that my prices were on the cheap side, until I found out what the College was doing.
You could walk in with $20, and a student ID, and " borrow " a copy of Windows, or Office, or whatever! Complete with License sheet and CD. Everything you get in the "OEM" release! They didn't even write down your student ID #!
And, if you didn't return it, you were out only $20...
This, of course, made me FURIOUS, and I made sure that Microsoft knew about it. That's when I started getting Cease and Desist letters alleging that I was commiting software piracy!
That's when the tide turned, and I began to see the light of GNU....
I'm never going back!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
It just happens to turn out that companies pay more for *nix gurus than they do for Windows gurus. So if they wanted to make some money when they graduated, I'd assume they knew how to work in *nix.
> In a 1996-97 survey of 148 undergraduates at three public universities and one private liberal arts college
Hardly a representative sample, in my opinion.
> Assane said it helped to have Chiang, then a master's student at UNLV, involved in the survey because he was familiar with student lingo and culture.
So basically this economics major asked a bunch of people he knew whether they pirate software or not? Does his sample include geeks vs. non-geeks, or only the econ-savvy?
> For one thing, software makers now commonly make agreements with computer manufacturers to "bundle" software
Oh yeah, bundled software really makes me want to pirate less. I love the incompatible copy of MS Works and bloated image loads of Windows that come with new computers (which don't include the original CD anyway, requiring me to obtain a copy in order to load it my way).
> Equally important, software vendors increasingly offer licenses to colleges and universities allowing students to use expensive software cheaply
THIS fact alone is why I feel piracy has decreased (if it really has), although I question the validity of the study without seeing more details.
> Software is simply cheaper now than it was in 1996, reducing the incentive to steal, Chiang said.
Says who? I don't remember exact numbers, but after adjusting for inflation, do the most commonly pirated titles (Windows, Office, Games) cost any less than they did then? I don't think so. Where is their source for this factoid?
> These might include creating a market for "subscriptions" to libraries music and movies or a more efficient approach to the pay-per-download market, he said
Well, at least they got this right, even though it's missing a word.
So, even though I am no longer a student the fact I have maxxed out credit cards and a morgage to to mention car and 'other' loans, means I should be warezing all my apps??
I think I will stick to http://www.debian.org until my finacial situation improves
ERR 411[Max number of witty sigs reached]
The study indicates that the percentage of students using pirated software has dropped. An alternative explanation may well be that as the use of the internet has accelerated less technically-savvy students want more/different kinds of software. They find it difficult or confusing to pirate, especially in a Windows environment which can make it hard to track where the file went. The result is the percentage willing to purchase increases, especially in light of falling prices and threatened legal action.
Well I go to UF... considering Computer Engineering majors got free full version software from a handful of big name software companies (Microsoft, Macromedia, to name two) this year. That could be the reason for the drop. :) Also could be the fact that it's Spring Break right now for us so there's only like 1 person up there downloading warez.
I hate to break it to you, but I doubt most students outside of IT and engineering have even heard of "free software". I don't think my housemates in biology/ecology/geography have ever heard of Linux, and they certainly wouldn't run it (Windoze works _fine_ for them). At any rate, I hope everyone uses GPL software someday (I don't... yet) but I think that students have yet to try it en masse.
Freedom: "I won't!"
jgerman wrote: "Maybe because the 96-97 crop of students are industry now, and know what it's like to have to purchase software and what makes the purchase worthwhile to students."
Your reply: "If the study was comparing the piracy among students in the 96-97 school year and those same people today, you would have a point. However, it is comparing the students in the 96-97 school year and the students now, which in most cases are different people."
I emphasized the point that jgerman was trying to make. The same ppl that were the pirates are now in the industry, they know why they pirated in the 90's thus they might know what would entice someone to actually buy the software instead of pirate it. There advantages to purchasing software legally, the trick is to make these advantages desireable to your target audience.
I don't want to justify / advocate piracy, but I can't help noticing that in some cases it might actually be a good thing for a software company to have its products widely distributed on a campus. Take for example technical software such as AutoCAD, ProEngineer, Matlab, Mathematica, etc. Student versions cost about 100$ (the price of a book), about the same price as educational on-campus licenses, so that their sales is probably negligible in comparison with industrial licenses (often in excess of 2000$ per license). What is interesting for them with warez is that an entire engineering school can get used to a certain software and then after graduation put pressure on their boss to buy thousand-dollars licenses.
For example, business students at the University of Florida pay about $50 annually to use statistics software that would cost as much as $1,000 if purchased outright, Chiang said.
In other words the the real problem with commercial software is that it is priced too highly.
I've always been of the opinion that if software was cheaper, more people would purchase it. I'm not suggesting that the ratio described in the snippet above is the correct one,and that software prices on the shelf should be a 20th of what they are currently, but software prices are often sized to the commercial/professional/enterprise users pocket, rather than to the individual/home users.
Also, per seat licencing generally racks up the prices.
Lower software prices is the way to go.
Well, it's true, isn't it? Content companies in general (game companies, movie companies, television networks, music, etc..) can't price their products and then expect people to pay that forever. Each of these companies have a serious problem looming over them, and that is too much content.
Let's look at the game industry, for example. There are at least 6 systems furiously competing today. (DC, PS2, XBOX, GC, GBA, PC) Each of these systems are releasing games like crazy. The problem is, my paycheck in the last few years hasn't risen high enough to buy that many more games, not to mention that the number of hours in the day hasn't increased enough for me to play them. If the number of games released is greater than the amount of disposable money people have to spend, how can they expect everybody to pay the same price for games?
Lowering the price of games for college students, for example, was a great approach! It'd be cool if one day your student ID could get you a discount on games.
I hope the RIAA pays attention to this study. The harder it is to copy music, for example, the more demand there is for somebody to do it. Where there's demand, there's fame. Where there's fame, there's somebody saying "Yes, I'm willing to invest hours into acquiring fame." But if the RIAA were to open up and say "We've lowered the price of CD's, and you're free to copy them and do what you want with them!", they will likely find that going to the store to buy CD's is preferable to waiting to download them.
One idea the RIAA should consider is releasing individual songs on those 2" CD's. Price them low, and then allow people to make their own mixes. Reward the customer for buying these little CD's by letting them create their own single CD that has the songs they want on it. Don't punish the customer for having other desires with music. That's what the economics game is all about. You'll make profit if you give the customer incentive to buy your product. But if you take features away, you're punishing them, and customers don't like that.
I know I don't like being told I'm a thief because I have an MP3 player.
"Derp de derp."
Before I started college as a CS major (this is my second year now), I was into the warez scene. Since my parents would never pay for any software that I needed, piracy was the only way I could get the apps that I needed (or just wanted). It was hard to break old habits, but I could afford the software now. Of course since I used to get everything for free, I look for the best deals. I purchased an oem edition of WinXP Pro for $130, and I'm soon going to recieve VS .NET Pro for $85 (academic discount). I also paid for all the shareware I use. Additionally, I don't even download mp3s I don't own anymore! I just get cds from cheap-cds.com or used cds and encode them to mp3s. That goes for movies, too. You might call me silly for doing all this, but I feel the software writers deserve it.
Of course I can't afford another copy of Windows for my other computer, but I use Linux on it anyway. I use my Windows box for Windows development, and my Linux box for Linux development, so I am well-rounded when it comes to writing on different platforms.
Steve
I definately see the logic in the following.
:)
:)
1. Offer Software to students @ 4% of list. This translates to less than most text books, and less than a pack of CD's
2. Corner a software market and saturate it to an entire generation before they hit the job market. *ahem Unix, AT&T*
3. Reap rewards when they make future recommendations to employers.
By Allowing students to pay a ridiculously small amount for software initially, they do infact purchase it for full price later on with corporations money....something they can justify
Now, the report says a decline in piracy? Nah, just a slight increase in "legitimate for school" software purchases. They still pirate Music and games, but at least we get the revenue of what they can afford for some APPZ!
- 50% of all taglines are, or are not.
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
Are games included in these figures? If so, could the growing number of online / pay-for-play games be skewing the results? How significant are MMORPG sales as a % of total software. You can pirate a copy of EQ, but it does you no good if you can't log in and play.
-- Adam
The reality here is that in '96-97 "pirating" as we know it today was not as stigmatized, so a student would be more apt to slip up and admit to it. With the attacks of the RIAA on everyone and schools removing T1 access to students who abuse the network by pirating, of COURSE students are going to "say no to pirating". How else could they continue to do it?
In 1996/7, they surveyed only 148 undergraduates, finding that about 78 of them (53 percent) admitted to pirating software. This is really too low of a number in too specialized a location (University of Florida students, who may or may not be like students at other universities) to be of much use, even as compared to data on University of Florida students nearly five years later. As if the low sample size and scant other mention about survey design didn't cast enough doubt about the accuracy of their conclusions, the surveyors admit that this number is inaccurate! From the article: " the researchers found 53 percent of the students admitted to pirating software - meaning the true number likely was considerably higher, Chiang said." The purpose of survey design is to create a survey that by its design reduces these built-in biases. If you know that people will lie to you if asked, it's good practice to double-check somehow by, say, auditing their computers for stolen software (you'd probably have to bribe them, and you'd definitely have to assure them that their names would remain anonymous, but still: if they were interested in good survey design, they needed to do better than this)
Even the most recent survey is pathetic. With 700 students surveyed, they now conclude that only 40% pirate (though did they ask the same questions this time? Were students more or less likely to lie this time? What? We need more information than this). But since the original survey was so small, with such a high margin of error, how can they then say with any degree of certitude that there has been a reduction in piracy? There really isn't a big difference between 50% piracy and 40% piracy if the margin of error is +-5% (which it must at least be).
So yeah, while their conclusion that people can be legitimately enticed to buy software (or music) by increasing quality and usefulness, take this survey with a chunk of NaCl.
sig my booty, check my website
No time to warez when your busy sharing MP3's!!
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
'creative' ways
you mean spam?
One thing some seem to have missed is that large universities are forced/woo-ed/cajoled into buying site licenses for M$ ware. (many millions of $) This knocks down the piracy and spreads the cost out over everybody on campus ... ahhh you use linux -- sorry doesn't matter you get to pay your part of the M$ tax since we'll hide it deep down in the budget.
Since when does "research" consist of having people fill out a survey? Every statistician would tell you that you need to be a little more caeful than that.
Now for the arguments given:
1) Bundled software prevents piracy: Yeah, true. No need to warez it if you have a legal copy. But how often is something actually useful included with a computer? Maybe something like Office, but I tend to save the $200 and leave it out. On top of that, you can't get things like Matlab, Maple, ProE, Photoshop, etc bundled.
2) Student prices prevent warez: Not really. $50 to $100 is still a LOT of money to spend on a piece of software that you'll only use for a semester or two. That's like up to 20 pizzas (for the resourceful)! Free is better. Or use a computer lab.
3) Free updates for using a real version: This is one of the lamest things in the article. If you need the latest point release THAT badly, you can get it.
So yeah, the article is a bit misguided in its assumptions. All in all, piracy might be declining, but I doubt we'll ever know.
Do you think that the students would admit that they were stealing their software? It reminds me of that old slashdot article showing a surved indicating that students will almost always by CDs as a result of using Napster.
Some of the software (read: Photoshop, ChemDraw, Mathematica, 3D Max) are still ridiculously over priced. There needs to be a sliding scale on the cost of software based on what you are using it for. If you are a student and are just learning it -- $30. If you are a company and you are making money off it -- $3,000. None of these guys have gotten that through their thick-skulls yet! When I was in school they offered student discounts on Photoshop -- for only $279 !! I warezed a copy instead for free. When you are a student, $279 is a LOT of money! Money that would be better spent on food, beer and getting laid. Until they address the fact that software is worth different amounts to different people -- piracy will never stop.
For example, let's say 2 out of 100 students stole warez one year. That's 2%. The next year, 1 out of 100 students stole warez. That's 1%.
You can now either accurately state that the rate went from 2% to 1%, which is a 1 percentage point decrease, or you can trumpet that the theft rate went down by FIFTY PERCENT!. Oh my GOD!
The funny thing is that when it's bad news, they use the more accurate percentage point method: for example, if an interest rate is going up from 5% to 6%, it somehow gets reported as a "1% point increase" rather than the more ominous "20% rate increase".
Last time one of my teachers endorsed a piece of software, he asked the students to spread the cd with the software on it.
tsss
The reason students buy more software is because at places like IU you get the software for as little as $5.(for microsoft products) Which is the approach all software companies need to make in regards to students and home use. Because there is no reason for a version of office that I use at home like one day a week, I should have to pay as much as a business. But currently the entire system works opposite of that. Where home users pay more than business users. Till this changes there will always be piracy. Like with development software, like I'm going to buy a full version of macromedia flash to play with it at home and learn it if I can download a crack for the demo version and learn it for free. And me doing this is not hurting macromedia if anything it's helping them. Because at the next job I have they may say oh you know flash and buy a copy to use. Where if i didn't crack the demo and learn it they'd never have sold that copy at all. Because if you look at software that is pirated heavily it's usually business software because home users can't afford it.
If your not cheating your not trying. If your not trying your not winning and if your not winning why play?
and sometimes the companies, i reason, like it that way. Consider for example, Pro-Engineer, a computer aided design program. The student edition sells for $300, which isn't a bad price considering it's about $40K per seat in industry- but it's still more than any of us Mech-E students would like to give up.
So we band together, buy one copy, and burn copies enough for everyone. Incidentally, I read the license, and it was pretty liberal- the only thing i saw anywhere restricting copying was somewhere along these lines- "There is no limit on the number of computers this software may be installed on, however, the cd must be in the drive for the program to run"
That's it.
I reason they probably want as many students to use Pro-Engineer as possible- so they're accustomed to it- and good with it- so when they start working for engineering firms, the firms are more likely to pay $20 - 40K per seat for an actual license, to make their engineers more productive.
It's really marketing. Of course, I may just be rationalizing my sins, but I've bought my fair share of windows software- and helped myself to the yearly upgrades. Do I feel sorry? no, cause I'm a piss poor college student. I'll pay for proper licenses when I'm a financially secure engineer.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
The point is I don't see anything of value that they have. It is entirely possible to mantain a healthy entertainment enviroment without listening to anything the RIAA and MPAA represent. Who the fuck needs U2, the Doors, Star Wars or any of the other "choice" crap, I have been living fine without it for awhile thanks.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Putting out a product worth buying at a price worth paying.
The RIAA has neither of those; the software industry, in some cases, does.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
It could be less a decrease in piracy, and more a decrease in willingness to admit to piracy. I remember when I was in college, we used to talk openly about who had the newest 0-day site on the floor, no fear. Then one of the kids got busted for selling burned PS1 games. Suddenly no-one on the floor was pirating anymore.. no really officer.. we all gave it up and got jobs...
Seriously though, with the insanity of the RIAA and MPAA lately attacking their own customers and the fans of their lables, maybe more folk are just spooked about owning up to trading warez.
-GiH
Translation: the numbers didn't match our agenda or preconceptions, so we assumed they were lying.
Oh, but these students are telling the truth....
It's unfair to speculate without seeing the full reports, but heck, this is Slashdot, right? ;-)
Here's a speculation. Ask 100 students if they're pirated software. What's the answer?
Might I suggest that the yardstick of lower copying isn't fewer students saying that they do, but higher sales? There's vague mention of sales incentives, but no actual data on increased figures.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The methods employed in this article to reduce piracy are billed as some sort of general purpose approach (these are the worst offenders, so if it works here...). But what are they doing? Bundling software with machines, and giving away supercheap licenses to enrolled students. This translates in other domains how?
I don't see either of these as ways to try to reduce warezing among non-student populations.
They didn't seem very happy (or surprised I would add) when I mentioned to them that this decrease in piracy could also be explained by the lack of compelling reasons that people had to upgrade to Windows and Office XP. (At this point the IT media were often talking about upgrading to XP with a "why bother" slant to the stories)
People aren't likely to steal what they don't want to buy in the first place.
I wonder if this is an element in the student stats.
I goto a medium sized state university, and one thing i was extrememly disappointed about when arriving here was how crappy my upload speeds, download speeds, and latency was. It always used to be that university kids had the best connections, so they were major hubs for warez trading. I'm lucky if i can get 15k/s down and 3 or 4k/s up. All of my friends at other schools experience the same thing. 3 years ago a friend i had at UIUC was bragging to me how he could get 350k/s down and 150k/s up. It seems that with both an increasing number of students with computers and also an increasing number of people using file sharing tools, universities have started to notice how expensive bandwidth costs and so have stopped being so generous. I used get alot of warez, but now im turning more to linux and open source solutions because im just too skeptical that a 400mb file will complete if its going at 4 or 5k/s.
"Moltar, I have a giant brain that is capable of reducing any complex machine into a simple yes or no answer."
If your school made a licencing agreement with microsoft, you are not just paying for the product with your $10 dollars for windows or $7 for office. The money for the multi million dollar licence agreement (~ 5mil at my school) comes out of your student computing fees... in other words you are paying microsoft significantly more than your pocket change even if you don't buy the product for their reduced price. This money could be going instead to hardware for labs, hiring more admins, or any number of other things.
Clearly, this is one of the sneaky ways for companyies to reduce piracy by bundling: Now the software is bundled with a college education.
Why do people warez? Simple. Software is too darn expensive.
Now, warezing is far from an easy, pleasant experience. Try and find a specific app/game, and you'll end up surfing plenty of ugly, spammy sites and dling several incomplete or inadequately named files. Try hotline or ftp, and be sent clicking banners to get passwords.
So, it's a grievous, unpleasant experience, Why do I do it?
Because I'm not shelling $50 for a game that might or might not be good, and I'm certainly not buying Photoshop when I'll use it 10-15 times at the most.
Hint: Reduce the price. Right now, you sell one copy of Black and White for $50; offer it at $20 and I guarantee a lot more people will buy it. I mean, I wouldn't hunt down something on the net if I could get it legit, with a nice manual, for $20. I probably will for $40, and I most certainly will for $300.
Warezing is not free; you pay in time and agravation. Make the price right, and warezing will go away (or at least diminish a lot)
That's not a very good way to perform a survey. First only 700 cases... How were the demographics determined. Did they select students from East, West, South? Did they go to universities with ethnic diversity? Did they talk to students of different class levels such as Juniors, Seniors?
There are too many factors that affect this. The fact that it is a survey e.g. asking somebody and dealing with the flaws that go with Surveys ( lying, altering the truth, fear of reprisal ) and then doing the survey based on what would seem a small sample that might not really be representative of the whole of College Students.
He wrote a program to disable a feature on a few thousand e-books. It wasn't a case where he pirated a copy of Starcraft.
I tend to agree that the numbers have dropped because the general computer population has increased.
Of course, this is assuming that you actually _use_ Microsoft products...
Since 1996, on college campuses, software is divided intoi 2 categories: Quake-like and non-quake-like. This eliminates the need for piracy, since most software is quake-like.
Slashdot is like Playboy: I read it for the articles
What does this article have to do with the RIAA? What does anything have to do with the RIAA? Slashdot is starting to remind me of Walter's character in "The Big Lebowski" who would turn anything and everything into a Vietnam issue. Get a grip!!
There coulde be a number of things. For professional software, companies like MS realize that winning over students is important as they make future decisions/recommendations. So through things like StudentDev and MSDNAA they get software to students at nothing to next-to-nothing prices. They realize the exploitable profit margins are slim, a student lacks money and will make due with what they can get, i.e. research cheaper alternatives or do it themselves, and when they go out into the workforce, they can recommend these cheaper alternatives to their business.
Of course, a huge part of piracy is game software. And lately the trend is for games to be massively multiplayer, and have to connect to central servers controlled by companies to play with other strangers. Part of the connection negotiation now typically includes the CD-Key, and if people try to share keys or generate keys that may be duplicate, they get shut out. While it may be possible to *eventually* cheat enough to get a CD-Key that is both valid and not duplicated, it is much more trouble than just buying the damn thing.
MS realizes this is the only way to prevent piracy, so they have to maintain a CD-Key to hardware hash database and use it to lock people out. Sure, you can generate CD-Keys all day long for professional and probably slip through WPA eventually, but there is a good chance that down the road someone else will be screwed over by doing that, when they try to activate. The only way is to disable WPA, and that isn't uncommon, since WPA offers no features. This strategy works extremely well for games, as the online verification is tightly tied to an important component of the games functionality that people don't want to give up.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
and that is probably the real reason why people bootleg less (bootleg, not pirate please). If I can go out and buy a full copy of Dreamweaver 4 that won't die after a year for only $100, that's incentive for me to buy a copy when I get the money. I'm a CS major so the same goes for Visual Studio (I'm more of a Java/Python geek, but knowing how to code for another platform is never a bad thing!)
The one thing I don't think that major software developers have taken into consideration is that if they would drop their prices even lower for students, remove all copy restrictions and make them perform like the real deal then almost no one would bootleg. If a student could get a full copy of Office XP pro w/out product activation for =$100 at their university bookstore they'd have little reason to bootleg. In fact if I could get a full copy of Dreamweaver 4 (my favorite web page editor) for $50 I'd go out to the JMU bookstore and buy a copy right now. And I know I'm not alone.
Side note to any entertainment industry drones in the audience: if I could buy a music CD for $5 plus shipping and handling or a DVD for $7.5-$8 plus S&H from your company website I'd be buying every week. That's how you make money in this day and age.
I think you have something here. As more and more people get access to the web because the web is easier to use, most of these people have less skills to get access to warez stuff. Four years ago a lot less college students were on the web, and those who were knew a lot more about computers and such.
I pay for the software i use the most. And most of that software is the easiest to pirate. :]
i dont pay for windows or office or most things that cost above $100 just because im not wealthy and most of the time they are overpriced
but i do have legal licenses for cuteftp, securecrt, textpad and a few other things that have small licenseing fees which i feel the person who wrote the software deserves my money.
it makes me feel good about paying a developer. But i dont feel inclined to give my money to a huge corperationg such as microsoft or adobe, even though there products are alot more valueable then simple utilities.
With all the money saved on music by downloading it, plenty left to buy software!
Let's think about who is using the software.
In 96-97, it was compuer enthusiasts. People who really felt that having a computer was necessary, because it was a tool that they could use to get great things accomplished. These people (due to their interest) were more interested in running software that was beyond their means, and trying out new things, and were savvy enough to accomplish it. These students tended to be more oriented towards sciences, or digital arts.
Fast forward to today, enter the AOL generation where school registration, bill paying, and even homework assignments are being done online. Every average joe needs to have a computer at school (or at least feels this need), and has little comprehension as to what's really going on when they swap their mp3s on napster. Oh sure, there are still scientific users, but the majority of today's computing users study other topics, like english, philosophy, dance, etc.
- passion
I dont think the number has gone down, i think the nuber of people lying on the survey went up :p
"Stuff... In my home!? NEVER!" - Zim on Invader Zim
"I want the toilet seat!" - Little Dog on Two Stupid Dogs
So what if P2P was shutdown. How many people were using P2P networks to download software in 96/97? Not many. Besides, what about IRC and regular old FTP? They don't get shutdown do they? Seems to me that wouldn't stop anyone if they really wanted something.
:).
On my campus (UMass) they only stop serving things like DVDs. As long as you don't serve large amounts of data, they do nothing.
This post was not meant as a flame, just criticism. Thank you for your time
"It's comin' back around again..." -RATM
What tends to happen nowadays is that textbooks are marketed with crippled versions of the software. For example, when I was (Unfortunately) forced to take a Visual Basic class, our book came with a compiler. It did everything, and had the MSDN libraries for VB, it just would not make an executable (Not a problem, just hop over to the computer labs on campus - they had the full version.)
In cases like that, piracy is down. The version that lets students work on classwork is fine, they tend not to need to create executables, or at the least, can do it in the labs when they get to class.
However, there's a big difference between software packages - you can take the compiling feature out of VB, and it's still useful to a student.
What of Photoshop and such? There's not much you can strip that won't severely affect what a student can do with it.
But, companies have wised up to that, too, and have started offering student discounts.
Which is good. Companies have had to known for years that the only way the future users of their products could learn on them was through piracy - most students I know can't afford multiple software packages of $100-600+. If they offer student discounts, well, they'll still have piracy, of course, but many students will opt to shell out a reasonable sum of money for the product. Win, win.
The school that I attend has software deals with all of the major manufactors, Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, etc...
:-)
I can walk into any of the campus computer labs and for free I can pick up a copy of just about any microsoft product. Win98, 2000, xp, office xp, visual studio, etc... Also I can get a full working version of oracle for $5.
My University has worked out software deals with these companies. They pay one fee each year and then the University can make as many copies of the software as they'd like.
I think this is a great way to go, because it keeps us legal, keeps the software cheap, and allows us to get experience on software we wouldn't otherwise be able to afford.
What makes buying software attractive to college kids who are accustomed to downloading it for free? (or using their iPod to grab it from Compusa.)
The only "benefits" of buying the software that I can see are the ones that have existed all along- pirated software has the increased risk of something "going wrong". (virus, backdoor program, or whatnot.)
-Sara
I see some synergy here between the "Get your PhD now!" spam and the "really cheap legit software" movement.
Careers should combine three things: what you can do, what you want to do, and what you can get paid for.
Well, the last piece of software I bought was RedHat 7.2. Maybe college students are buying more software because there are more and more viable alternatives from companies worth supporting. I've never paid for Windows--I never wanted Microsoft to have my money. But now that I run Linux I send my money even when I don't have to.
I feel like most of the cash I send to RedHat comes back to me in the form of better product and a stronger Linux community. Most of what I send to MS goes to advertising and shareholders.
-Erik
Like many pointed before, Open Source software has gained a lot of use. Kids in CS programs all use Linux/BSD, and with the increase in computer ownership across the student population (lets face it: most probably do not have the wherewithal to deal with warez), its no wonder that there is a smaller percentage of warez users... Besides, with all the publicized piracy crackdowns (which have probably been bolstered by stringent school policies to discourage piracy on campus), I would expect even fewer students to admit to warez' ing...
they interviewed a whole 148 students the first time, no mention how many were involved this time. needless to say, their polling tactics aren't terribly good. my psychology teacher in high school would've bitch-slapped me had I been so careless with available resources and drawing such unfounded conclusions
- As you mentioned, decreased risk of something "going wrong."
- Not having to take extreme caution about who finds out that you have the software.
- Not getting "bit" by some of the more clever registration / licensing schemes that are designed to catch pirates.
- Some prayer of support if there *is* a problem with the software.
Not that most of these benefits didn't exist before, but if you emphasize them and figure out how to balance your prices against what college student's would be willing to pay you may generate a lot of interest in actually purchasing your products.GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Shame on all of you who pirate software. That's my 2 cents, now I'm going to watch my LOTR svcd...
When I was a student, I paid (IIRC) $350 for the academic-priced Photoshop. Yes, I paid. And yes, that's a great deal -- Photoshop really is worth twice that.
But $350 was a fucking lot of money for me back in the days when a $3.50 sandwich seemed expensive.
Yes, a lot of student pirates out there have money to burn -- but a great many don't. Many students are working one or two jobs to pay their way through school, and struggling to make rent. Sure, games are cheap. But the software that students need for their education really is expensive.
I'm not necessarily defending rampant piracy, but don't get so cocky about students' spending habits. I think if you saw "an honest analysis of their lifestyle", you'd find out that a lot of them are genuinely broke.
There's still tons of piracy going around college campuses. People always come to me to "borrow" my CD's, which are usually burned in the first place.
If software didn't cost so damn much, then maybe we'd pay for it. But a college student who wants to write a program in Visual C, for example, shouldn't have to pay a massive amount for Visual Studio (even the academic version is overpriced).
Good thing that Microsoft was nice enough to send one of our computer clubs a free copy of Visual Studio. It has now been duplicated plenty of times, and now we all have copies.
How about some realistic pricing?
Macromedia Authorware 6: $3,084
Adobe Photoshop 6: $700
Adobe Premiere 6: $620
Adobe Illustrator 10: $470
MS Office XP: $580
MS VS.NET Professional: $570
Macromedia Director 8.5: $1,199
Now, I don't support warezzzzzzzzzzzzing
programs.
But the average student, developer, even small business cannot afford this. Period. When the
average cost of development tools, operating systems, graphics programs, etc. are $500 - $3000 EACH, and the market cannot support that kind of pricing, then potential customers will find another way: either they'll find a less expensive program that has much of the same capability, buy it second-hand, or do without.
This is one reason I think the market for second-hand software is increasing, as much as the publishers would like to have it otherwise.
One thing these publishers should realize is that not every potential customer is a cell-phone-flipping, white shirt and tie "IT Executive" with steel-rimmed glasses and access to a six-figure expense budget.
This, of course, made me FURIOUS, and I made sure that Microsoft knew about it. That's when I started getting Cease and Desist letters alleging that I was commiting software piracy!
So I owned this computer store.. yadda, yadda, yadda - and Microsoft sends me a cease and desist order!
There's less piracy because many schools force the students to buy the software! At my school, polytechnic university, www.poly.edu, they made all the people that come in lease laptops from the school, on which they included all the software like Office and Visual Studio and a whole plethora of programs people usually warez because they are only used for a term (MatLab, DesignCAD - yes maybe some of you use these day-to-day, but for most poeple I know these are used only for a term or two). So as part of the lease, the students pay for this stuff! Lucky they started the program after I came into the school I guess. It's probably similar in many other schools- hence the reduction in piracy.
While I can't speak for any other university, the majority of the required class software (especially the large packages from Microsoft and Adobe) at my university are available for free use to students in any one of many computer labs on campus.
I think I've only heard of a single class where the required class software wasn't already in the lab. And in that case, the professor had already negotiated a site license with the developer and was able to give free copies to any of his students.
When it comes right down to it, there are two reasons a student would buy the software. One reason is for the *convenience* of being able to work from home. And remember kids...convenience costs money. The other reason would be that the student is going to use the software beyond the duration and scope of the class. In that case, the student would've ended up buying the package anyway regardless of the class requirement.
Why didn't you write "stealing less?" That's what it's all about.
I think one reason people are buying more games is because of some of the Online games. Games of that genres make it difficult for a person to play with a pirated CD online.
Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
So that's why Wal-fart has those isles of boxes. I thought they were for demonstration purposes.
Although probably broader than just students, I've found myself warezing games less in recent memory because of CD-Keys. Most retail games now that have any kind of online play aspect require you to have a unique CD-Key / Serial Number from all of the other online players of the game, and thus you need a retail copy to acquire one of these keys if you want to play online - and for a lot of games, that's where the most fun lies. Of course, you can get around this sometimes, but for the most part, it's usually easier to just buy the damn game.
I just purchased Microsoft Office for Macintosh OS X for $6. The Windows version costs $10. I can also buy Visual Studio for $6 or Visio for $3.
Legit. My university (Southwest Texas State) has a deal with Microsoft.
Any student in the US can get Mathmatica for about $140 versus $1,500.
Against all of the other educational expenses, software costs are pretty much non-existent.
To those students who say that must steal their software because they "can't afford it", I say...
Sell one of your computers
Skip one of this year's vacations
Cut down or quit drinking/drugging/smoking
--Richard
my favorite argument against software piracy is that it raises the cost to the consumer.
I learned in Econ 101 that the vendor charges what the market will bear...We appear to be bearing it just fine, so I really doubt that it'll drop.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
Perhaps windows is so unstable, it's not paying for?! The market is saturated with isht products. People will automatically buy things they support/big fan of.
There used to be a place near me that rented out computer games and applications. They had one wall full of DOS programs and another full of Amiga programs. There were actually a number of these stores in various locations around town. Eventually they went out of business because of the legal ramifications. Software companies didn't want people trying before they bought.
Most universitys are being put under threat by microsoft and apple to enforce piracy issues by forcing the universities to pay micosoft and apple so much money per term per student out of their computing fees instead of facing potentially (and i suspect some what unmerited and unproveable)million dollar lawsuits!!
At my university we pay $60 a semester for computing fees - now- no thanks to Gun Toting Microshaft and Apple - $12 every semester is going to Microshaft and Apple - that's $12 that previously went to our departments to provide students with advanced computing tools (for film students final cut pro - newer machines - for engineering students more clusters - for cs students more clusters etc!). So if you are here for 4 years (or 5 as most) and $12 a semester gone - that's $96 - now you think awesome - for $96 I get free and reduced cost copies of office, xp, mac office, etc - but in the end microsoft is making a lot of money it doesn't deserve for all those other students who don't have the need for a computer(it's cheaper to use campus resources) or those suites - or for those of us who use linux and will never buy office products.
I'd rather my department get the money in the face of huge budget cuts and fewer classes and resources for students. for our university alone there's 25,000 students - in one semester microsoft is scamming out $300,000 - $600,000 for the year. now every state school controlled by our regents is part of this deal - so the other big university has 25,000 students approx too - so let's see - 1.2 million just from two university a year in the middle of the midwest. great scam.
Microsoft and Apple are using scare tactics and threats of expensive legal action to bully universities across the country out of a lot of money to partake in giving the edu's cheaper software - but is it really?
Software companies didn't want people trying before they bought.
I don't know if that's really a fair statement: Most software companies now offer trial or crippleware of their software if you want to try it out. There was a place (I think called "The Software Library") around these parts and it was well known as the best Warez source around : Rent it and dupe it (or just install it) and return (and you didn't even have to spend hours downloading).
What kind of creative math brings you to *that* conclusion?
Again, let's examine who most of the game players are? As a general rule, they're younger people... teens, pre-teens, and a number of "20-somethings". These are exactly the demographics that don't generally tend to earn high incomes.
Just how many $50 games do you expect these people to buy in a year? Of course many of them have hundreds of pirated games - but they just copied them because it cost them nothing but the free time and a miniscule amount for the blank media.
Game developers need to face the facts that they'll *never* achieve more than a fractional number of people in the game-buying demographic who will buy any given game title. If you could completely stamp out *all* piracy tomorrow, I'd wager that software sales wouldn't go up noticeably.
The most successful games made recently sold as they did primarily because they worked well for LAN gaming and Internet play. This is the quickest way to achieve improved sales. (If you're on a limited budget, and you're ready to buy 1 new title, you're more likely to give in to peer pressure of your friends saying "Dude, you need to buy 'Cool Networked Battle-Bots' so we can duke it out this weekend!", than to just pick out a single-player game, based on some promises listed on the box.)
I can think of many reasons why this could be.
The first, of course, is that the guy is right. Software companies have shown students the value of paying for software. One of the reasons there is a value is that except for the price of the OS, which has risen, the price of most software has fallen.
Another reason is that more computers come prebundled with Office. I remember getting my first computer, and there were very few of the middle tier companies that pushed you into buying Office. Now it is damned difficult not to get office when you get a gateway, for example. YMMV with other OEMs.
I'd like to know how the question was phrased. A lot of the students don't realize that what they are doing is considered theft. At least that's what they tell me at the school I work with when I help students. But their lawyers in training, so they don't think anything they do is illegal.
Just some thoughts.
I'm in Comp. Sci. at university, and really, the only software I need is a text editor to write my code, a compiler to compile my code, and an OS to run it on. All the software I need is available for free. I'm running Linux, and I can use vi, nedit, or emacs to write my code. C, C++, Java, you name the language, there's a free (as in open source and beer) compiler available for it.
Not all the courses I'll be taking involve programming, however. I will have to take humanities courses, and an English (technical writing) class. There are free word processing applications too.
I don't have any commercial software on my computer, and won't ever need any to get me through my educational career. If the employment I find is at all similar, I probably won't need commercial software for the rest of my life.
-kidlinux.
If my younger sister is more inclined to purchase Office XP than I was to copy the Office 97 CD from the IT dept, it's because she can get it for 10 bucks at the bookstore. I didn't have that option.
- Dan I.
And that proves it. Office XP is only worth $10 to students. :) Actually, it probably not too far from the truth what with OpenOffice.org out there. Few students would need more than what is offered in OpenOffice. Also remember that it's to Microsoft's advantage to make it easy for students to obtain their products. If I had used Office in college, that's what I would have wanted to use when I graduated.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Since when did IRC deserve to be lumped in with BBS's and other "old" online technologies? It didn't really become part of the scene until 1990 or so.
Thank you SO MUCH for making me feel OLD! 8-P
Guges
I got to Wichita State University, www.wichita.edu . The bookstore offers NO DISCOUNTED SOFTWARE. All of the windows stuff, etc. is supra expensive! My friends go to IaState and they gave me the lowdown that MS is trying to offer them cheap software if and only if the campus switches over to MS software for 'everything'. And then, rumor has it (aka prolly just forget about this sentance) that they will only get subscription based products that the fee of $10 a year goes up to full price when they graduate.
I know WSU run Unix/Linux for all of their systems. All the laptops that they use for freshman initiaition/enrollment all run Red Hat Linux. Remote campuses PCs are owned buy whoever is working there at the time, one guy owns a mac, the other guy has a windows box, and the other is running FreeBSD -- all use an SSH connection over the WSU WAN to get to the student information.
If wichita state switched to MS, offered me cheap software and the rest of our campus but then had to dump their current well working setup - I doubt it would ever happen. Would it decrease piracy? Hell yes it would. IMHO I would pay $10 a pop for WinXp - but not $200. Same goes for Office, Dev apps, Photoshop, etc.
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
You know why piracy has gone down? Software companies just give away tons of legit copies (at least at the big-name schools). For example, I can get Microsoft whatever (not that I'd want it) for free, legally, and I can keep it even after I graduate. Same for the anti-virus stuff, Eudora, etc. Similarly for Mathematica and Matlab, except I think they have limited-term licenses. On the other hand, the really high-end software, like Cadence/Mentor Graphics stuff, is available on the Unix workstations and is easy to run remotely (X) because of ample bandwidth. In fact, this is easier than pirating, because you don't have to install the programs. The only software left to pirate are games, and if it's a good game it's nice to have the physical matter (not to mention you don't have to worry about mod chips, boot discs, or other hacks). Although I personally don't do it (honestly), the piracy seems to have moved to music and movies (I've heard kids have 100s of CDs of downloaded movies they never even watch. Stupid.).
The killer is that textbooks don't lose value. My $90 3rd edition calc book might be seven years old, but it still has calculus I can learn.
If I paid $400 for a license of Visual Studio in 1996, I would probably only be able to make software that works on NT 3.5 or Windows95.
Photoshop is probably worse - don't know never used it. I would bet there's a dozen more/better features than there was in the version they released five years ago.
...by hacking a copy of Mathematica 'cause you sure don't understand percentages.
I know why theres less piracy among collegiate students. Its because the new consoles are far harder to pirate games for! You have to get ahold of one of those ps2 mod chips somehow, if you have a ps2; otherwise you're screwed. I suspect it will jump back up as ps2 mod chips become easier to acquire, and become available for other consoles.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
I no longer use, nor have any interest in using, MS Office. I use StarOffice. MS Office has about a billion features that I do not need or ever use. StarOffice, OTH, has about a half billion features I don't need or use.
Also, games are pretty much the same as they were back then. A few years ago, Quake2 was the coolest first person. Personally, I hate Q3. Now I play Half Life Counter Strike (based on Q2). Even if you like the newer stuff better it is still only a rehash of the old stuff.
Lack of innovation is definately slowing down my desire for new software. Is OfficeXP really better than Office 95? Is Quake 3 really better than Half Life? Will Duke Nukem Forever ever be released?
Sorry, everything I have works. I am not interested in pirating because there is nothing of interest out there.
The reason they're not "Warez"-ing so much is because they get ridiculous discounts on software......like I should have to pay $349 to upgrade my borland license, when a college student can buy the exact same package ( yeah, like if he's worth half his salt, he's not going to use it to write software for someone and get paid ), for only $100. If you go to any of the local computer shows...you'll see vendors reselling these exact same packages that they've bought of "starving" students and reselling them at HUNDREDS of dollars off what their retail prices are..... How about actually selling things like Visual Studio.Net Enterprise Developer at something realistic, not $1079 as an UPGRADE. Puh-leez. Where the hell is my old student ID, anyway ? M
it started in 1988 actually:
;-)
but any internet tech that goes back farther than the web is old enough
In a 1996-97 survey of 148 undergraduates at three public universities and one private liberal arts college, the researchers found 53 percent of the students admitted to pirating software - meaning the true number likely was considerably higher.
Before I went back to school, I graduated from the police reserve academy. During the academy, I faintly recall a phrase along the lines of "anything you say can and will be used against you . . . " For some reason, if someone called me up asking me if I have committed a federal crime, I don't think most college students would 'fess up. Then again, there are the jocks and the education/sociology/psychology majors, many of whom are still using "that there new Internet thing."
When I took "sadistics" class, I remember something about a "valid" sample. 148 surveyed out of how many millions of undergrad students? Even at that, better than half still admitted to warezing! And he admits that most of the ones who said they didn't probably lied. In sum, you have an invalid sample reaching an admitted unreliable conclusion that, in itself, contradicts the article's "conclusion." Typical of the "news" you see on ./
Still a third issue affecting the decline in piracy is price. Software is simply cheaper now than it was in 1996, reducing the incentive to steal, Chiang said.
Not true for the largest company in the industry. Make no mistake about it, prices for M$ products have gone up, not down, especially for their latest monstrosity, XP. When you're a monopoly, you can raise prices, even when the market is in the toilet. But I digress. Anyway, many of those academic licenses provide cheap or free (just got a fully working copy of Win2K) software with the proviso that it is to be deleted upon leaving school. And of course, every single student does so immediately after graduation. Riiiiight. That, to me, comes perilously close to the dictionary definition of "piracy", further invalidating the "conclusion" of the "study."
Actually, the people who have/use Linux/GIMP/etc. probably ALSO have, and perhaps use, Windows/Photoshop/etc. Those are the tech savvy people, not the average (and majority) user. The majority of users are still in the Windows/Office/"usual-software" loop.
I suspect that students are much better informed of what infringement is, and the repercussions of infringement. What would you reply if you were infringing and knew how the study was going to be used?
--everytime you learn something a piece of your brain is replaced by something that someone else said
Probably it's because the majority of the students on college campuses right now that have computers can't figure out where to get warez from.
In '97 or so, there was a significantly smaller percentage of students with their own machines. There wasn't even PPP connection to the dialup pool at my college in '96, let alone ethernet in the dorms. Now there's ethernet drops everywhere, wireless APs in a couple of buildings, and 80%+ of the students brought computers with them to college.
It's a completely different demographic, so naturally it's a different result. Computer geeks who know where and how to get warez are a smaller percentage of the whole now.
--saint
Some people I know register for a few classes, buy software thats marked down, then drop out of classes. Some colleges offer academically priced software up to around 30% off....
I'm curious where your sister goes... because I want to transfer. Here at Tulane, I believe OfficeXP pro is $199 (maybe $149... I don't use it so I haven't looked lately). The educational discount is good... but never THAT good.
They dont need to buy software. They have Linux.
... but doesn't all this prove is that proportionally fewer students are admitting to stealing software? To me this seems independant of wether or not they are actually stealing software. Is it not plausible that pirating software is just as prevalent as before, if not more so; and due to their perception of increasingly draconic IP policies on the part of software producers are now less willing to openly admit to pirating software?
That simple economics makes sense? If your prices are too high then the demand from those with less disposable cash will be lower. And if you lower your prices, more people might buy your product. If you make your product available to those who are in the education product, then they will be educated in the use of YOUR product, thereby making your product more valuable to those that might need to utilize your product later.
The student that buys Autocad (or whatever) isn't buying it to use it commercially. He's buying it so he can learn to use it. This means, later when companies are making CAD software purchases, and more of their potential employees know Autocad, what do you think makes more sense? Use the software everyone already knows how to use, or pay for training to use software that nobody is familiar with.
For every copy a student purchases, they're purchasing a lifetime of corporate upgrades for your product. TRY to see the big picture here.
Even if they warez your software, the end result is the same. Despite what the BSA might be telling us, most corporations of significant size don't make company policy for widescale piracy. They're going to buy the needed software, and they'll be paying through the nose for it, all to the benifit of the software companies that provide it. But they won't be giving the money to YOU if everyone learns to use someone else's software.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
At Indiana University, we get almost all Microsoft products (including VS.NET) for $5/CD or for free over the web. Of course, we sold our souls to them for this deal.
Head down, go to sleep to the rhythm of the war drums...
"I'm curious where your sister goes... because I want to transfer. Here at Tulane, I believe OfficeXP pro is $199 (maybe $149... I don't use it so I haven't looked lately). The educational discount is good... but never THAT good."
Bowling Green State University. I know Office 2K was only ten bucks to cover the cost of the CD. I presume (perhaps incorrectly) that XP is the same way. It was part of the deal that the University arranged with MS and other vendors. I know a few other schools at least that are like that.
- Dan I.
Where do I sign? It would be cheaper to pay to go to college than to buy all the MS products. =]
-Sara
I would bet that the decline can be contributed in large part to the fact that a number of large universities now have site licenses with Microsoft and other software companys. Who would bother with warez when you can get the CDs and a legal license for $10.
Well that is sad. However, I will try to make up the slack and get as many warez as I can starting tonight!
Here at UNC Chapel Hill, incoming freshmen required (or so they trick you into thinking) to buy laptops through the school (Carolina Computing Initiative). Price is kind of cheap, but the warrenty, repair, and insurance provided is pretty decent. The software provided is everything a basic student needs (check the CCI site as well as the downloads). I signed up for introduction to computer programming my freshman year, and everyone got a copy of Visual J++ 6.0. Office XP is $10 bucks through student stores.
:oP
Along with this and the increasing amount of freeware out there, who really needs anything else? You've got your instant messenger, you've got your winamp, you've got your snood...90% of college kids are set for 4 (or 5) years without ever needing any type of upgrade! That way we can spend money on our DVDs and blank CDs (which is of course offered standard with the most purchased model through CCI). That just leaves piracy to mp3s, which only hurts the RIAA because of their stance on the matter...don't get me started on this one, I could go extremely off topic
The first survey in 96-97 was of 158 students in 3 different colleges by an economics major interested in piracy. Most of these students were probably friends and/or acquaintances.
The next survey was of 700 students at only 2 universities. This was probably a lot greater spectrum of students many of whom were in less technically oriented majors. ie: Much of the population doesn't know enough or care enough about computers to even begin pirating software.
Perhaps the piracy rates have changed in the past 4 years, perhaps not, but I don't think these surveys will tell us a thing one way or the other.
This is because there's no way to prove how much copying software affects companies' profits.
There is also no way to prove that a crime has been prevented. Only that fewer have taken place than a similar time period in the past.
"There are three kinds of falshoods in this world, Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics" --Unknown (to me anyway)
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
[GIMP] will surpass photoshop [in the prepress department]. just wait.
Not until the patents on prepress color processing run out. This could take several years, or even longer if the pharmaceutical industry manages to get some kind of Cherilyn LaPierre Patent Term Extension Act passed.
However, GIMP (or $100 Photoshop Elements if you must) would be ideal for college students doing web work or game work, as those activities don't require CMYK or any prepress color correction beyond simple Image > Colors > Levels... and tweaking the gamma.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The big problem with the RIAA is that they think they can act like an economic cartel and continue to do so.
Problem: the invisible hand of economics will put cartels out of business fairly quickly. By pricing CD's at US$18 per album-length disc, this results in a price point that encourages piracy, not discourage it. If the RIAA were smart and price their CD's at US$11 per album-length disc the incentive to pirate music drops to negligent levels.
Why either buy or pirate a commercial product when the Web is overflowing with GPL'd goodies?
Because a particular GPL'd app doesn't exist yet (such as vector animation authoring or CMYK separation), and a potential pirate or purchaser typically doesn't have the means to either 1) write the software herself or 2) wait for patents to expire so she can do 1).
I do not advocate piracy unless the copyright law in question is unjust or otherwise unconstitutional.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I go to RPI and you can get any product that the "help desk" has for FREE. Just go down, talk to one of the guys that works there. If you need software for a class, it is free. So are copies of win2k, XP, 98, probably NT and Office XP, Maple, Visual C++ and a few other things like the school's edition of solid works. Although they have some blocks on some of the software, like in photoshop and solidworks, you must be on the college network, but with most of it, you can use it anywhere. Anyway, if you are a college student, when are you not on the network?
In PE you could take a tennis class. How the hell are you gonna teach someone how to be fit for life, if you let them take one single sport?!
Guess what? Flash is fun. I took a Flash course at an Art College night class. It was fun. If they had it at my University, I would have taken it for fun. And as an Art and Design major, I would have been able to use that class and the tools it taught me (using timelines, logically planning before beginning, being aware of file sizes and optimization, ...) elsewhere in school and in my career so far. When you learn an app, you don't just learn about that app.
University isn't about being so general you cover all the bases and never learn any real skills. That's what Business major's are for.
You know what?
Most companies offer student/education discounts:
Authorware: $349
Adobe: Couldn't find a pricelist, but there are forms or something for discounted software.
XP (Standard/Professional): To be resold at about $8 (in fact, at my school on Monday, Microsoft was giving away XP and VS.NET).
All of these were found by searching the respective sites with the term "student pricing."
Ben
i remember the days of idrve and juston when there very lenient download limits and no speed limits
now you have to deal with alot more pop up windows and misleading links
but i geuss i am old fashioned
by the way, it would be cool to have a beowulf cluster of people buying their software
Can't beat a $5 OS.
There is a catch though, you can only purchase once (even if you lose the disk). Of course the solution to that is to either make copies, or get someone to buy for you.
-
Anyway, if you are a college student, when are you not on the network?
When you're living off campus.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
This is a SURVEY we're talking about. It's not like they're omnipotent. If some random person called you up and asked you that, would you tell the truth? Of course not. Many of the respondants probably lied, because warez is being cracked down upon legally, but it is still as easy to get as ever.
Repeal the DMCA!
For that matter, how do you pronounce 'Warez'?
Does anyone PRONOUNCE Warez anyway?
or maybe they are just lie more now.
Well folks, what we could also be seeing is a side effect of Micro$oft eliminating or assimilating almost all of the competition.
Remember Lotus, DBase, Wordperfect, just to name a few?
What consumer software company is still alive in the desktop PC market? Most the the remaining big players offer large multi $$$$ packages. Think Oracle, C/A, SAP, etc. - no real interest for your average student. Even the big PC game bubble has slipped in favor of the dedicated set top gaming box.
So in the old days your typical non-engineering student would pirate 4-5 relevant packages - now
they pirate zip. There's no need because the DELL box Daddy bought has Windows and Office on it - what else do you need?
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras
I go to a university in florida about 4 or so hours away from UF and I can tell you that warez is still going strong. Browsing over the very insecure Windows Network Neighborhood I found many 'go here for password to my share and get my warez.' There is also a large amount of students who idle on IRC looking for Mathmatica or another 'needed' app for classes. I've also noticed college staff/admins with warez ... one teacher was using a core keygen for some software, another was installing Microsoft Office on lots of systems with a internet-found license ... he didn't like my idea of using Star Office or Open Office instead.
i'm a cgi student at the moment, and i talk to industry professionals once in awhile, at siggraph and such. i have a split opinion on the matter of software piracy/software protection. several companies are offering student versions for free, or with discounts(softimage, photoshop).
one of the reasons why software piracy is still present is that these companies cripple their software so much that none of the content generated with it can be put onto a professional demo reel. maya recent strategy, the watermark on all renders, is an excellent work around this issue; it offers all features, plus an employer is likely to appreciate your integrity if its clear that you followed the rules.
in addition to student version's increased availability, software companies are funding more and more schools. softimage xsi has an excellent strategy: train more xsi drivers, market needs xsi, xsi sales increase. everybody wins.
i don't condone thievery, but i also don't condone highway robbery. much of the software seems is in a price range that a production studio may view as nominal, but as a student is much too expensive. i've heard the "it costs money to make these programs, you know" argument a thousand times, and frankly it doesn't cost $10,000(alias wavefront maya 4.0 unlimited) a package to make ANYTHING. these high-end graphics companies are creating software for a high-paying demographic. i believe that they are gradually learning the harmful effects of creating an elitist market.
software piracy probably won't ever go away. too many people like free beer. there's alot that can done to minimize the blow. creating a new student demographic and marketing a seperate package solely for them is a great way to do this.
I have no desire to reach nirvana.
You obviously have no idea how thorough one must be when collecting and interpreting data for a PhD or referred paper. You havn't even read the damn paper or methodology yet you're criticising the findings. May be you should wait until you finish elementary school before you start trying to reinterpret interesting findings. Perhaps there are other interpretations, but your criticism amounts to: "Oh nah, I don't reckon, you know, just because he probably didn't collect the data properly, and I'm such a legend I know this without even reading the paper." It's so ugly when retards such as yourself decide that a study is crap because you remember something from maths class and you think that automatically makes you a statistics wizard.
Why is /. linking to such an unprofessional article? It doesn't tell us what statistical methodology was used, controls, the questions asked, etc.
Short on details a lot on speculation and outright assumptions.
This is irresponsible posting. It's no better than M$ FUD.
eTrade SUCKS
You are a commi bastard! You are way out of touch man. Obviously you have never lived below the poverty line while trying to get an education. And if you have, may be you have forgotten what it's like.
And thats just the way it is, because no sane person believes that priacy is stealing, since the people who you pirate from never loose their copies of the software.
I don't know if the "who's" was intentional or not, but bravo!
Comparing the subject pool for the surveys is vital to making sense of this. Others have made the point that people are more digitally aware now, and I agree with that. It seems every year more PC stuff becomes Common Knowledge. Nearly everyone is aware that you can download music and burn it to CD, and that's easy enough to do.
HOWEVER, owning a computer and using AOL does not make you an expert on what is going on with your coomputer. I am a student, and a TON of people I know had their computers 'set up' by someone else. A few of my guy friends think this is a good way to impress the ladies.
Anyway, those people probably couldn't much other than they run windows, and AOL is really fast at college. Combined with people who would lie about piracy, the number is just based on the luck of the draw unless the procedures and samples are standardized.
You are way out of touch. Obviously you have never lived below the poverty line. And if you think you have, perhaps you were mistaken. And if you weren't mistaken, perhaps you have forgotten what it was like.
As an industry position paper, this describes my situation pretty well. As a user of pretty much every fileshare program out there, I still feel the need to buy software in certain special cases. Not to say that there isn't software on my computer that skirts the bounds of legality($140 for the latest version of Mathematica is too much for a poor student). However, I recently was forced to purchase Homeworld so I could play with my 13-year-old little brother online - something about the serial number not working for the online service. I was surprised what I got for $10. Nice manual, carefully written backstory, as well as the strategy guide. In other words, a perfect example of extra incentives that worked pretty well and satisfied a reticent college-age consumer.
'Be always mindful, even when ditch-digging.' --D. T. Suzuki
The current offer from Microsoft says nothing about switching to MS for "everything." MS wants to charge the campus $300k for a site licence for several MS apps including Office XP for PC and Mac and WindowsXP Professional.
Some tentative plans for paying the fee included raising student fees about $10 and then charging "media" fees for university provided cd's.
This software would NOT be subscription or compulsory. Students who graduate would be free to keep any software they want.
At this point in time, it appears the university will reject the offer.
In my freshman year, I was using a pirated copy of Office 97 on a pirated copy of Windows 98.
In my senior year, I was using Star Office 5.2 on Redhat 7.0.
I guess I'm not pirating software anymore, but I'm certainly not paying for it either!
My Karma was at 49, then they switched to words. All that work for nothing!
I've always believed that if companies charged fair prices for their products, most people would be willing to buy software and not steal it. Heck, I jumped at the chance to get Windows XP Pro & Office Pro XP for a lousy $30 and not $800. Same too when we bought Office for OSX for $30, not $500. If Microsoft didn't force people to crappy upgrades, and charged lower prices across the board (and not just to educational customers), much piracy would vanish. Me, I pirated software in college (when they didn't have many educational discounts), only to buy them a few years later when I knew how to use them and could get them at discount because I worked for a retailer ($600 pagemaker, just $50)
Note too that CD prices have QUADRUPLED in the past 20 years, while the disposable income of MOST Americans has DECREASED. That's a big factor in why we should knowingly screw the RIAA. As a musician myself, I don't for an instant buy the RIAA's argument that musicians will stop making music because people snag their tunes on napster/kazaa/gnutella.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
..that studying economics make you a more selfish, dishonest person. There were some sociological tests which showed that students who completed economics courses were
less likely to return found money
more likely to freeload in the face of voluntary, secret contributions to a common goal.
more likely to defect in the prisoner's game
more likely to cheat on an exam if they were certain they would not be caught.
more likely to keep goods which were shipped to them by mistake, even if they knew the intended recipient's address
These figures are higher than a control group which studied another subject (astronomy) and also the figures show an increase of dishonesty for the same students before and after they completed the class. There are a few such studies, very amusing to read. I can't find a web reference, but I read this, with footnotes to the actual studies, in Doug Henwood's "Wall Street".
So this might also have skewed the study.
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
Just a little plea for the proper use of the language. Piracy is a violent crime which still carries on in some parts of the world, often resulting in the death of its victims.
The practice being referred to here is "Illegal Copying" which never results in its victim's death.
Dunstan
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
I still stole the Ferrari, even if I took it for the joyride and returned it before the owner needed it back. I don't think there is MAJOR impact to the software giants via warez, but if I can't afford the gee-whiz big bang Adobe/Microsoft/whatever software, I'll probably buy someone else's product that accomplishes the same end result. So in the end, product is exchanged for commodity.