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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 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)
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
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.
I totally agree, when I was young and poor and a student (three years ago) all the software on my pc was hot as hell. Now, I actually buy the stuff I want... Most students are stoney broke and warezing the course language is a definate advantage to those that had to go to campus to use it. And no I didn't want to cough up for Modula-2. Yuk. With regards the comment that its like buying books I flogged my books after uni (the ones that I wasn't going to use) which is tricky with dated software. Also a lot of the educational purchases require you to either pay up more if you want to use it after uni or dump it. Live and let live. I warezed when young and now do not. I accept that I may be paying for those that are warezing now. What goes around comes around eh?!
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.
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!
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 ...
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
"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!
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
Everytime someone claims that they "didn't have the money", I'd love to see an honest analysis of their lifestyle : Almost always there is beer, movies, electronics, new computer hardware, a car with insurance, gas, and upkeep, etc, but people feel fine paying for those, but that new game or image editing app isn't worth $39.
Piracy has seriously undermined the software industry for years: Something that has such an incredibly ramification on people's lives (i.e. consider the number of hours that people spend using computers these days), yet in a yearly % of consumer income I doubt you'd see it hit 1% per year. Hrmmm, this would be a really interesting foundation for a study actually : What is the net value of software (in entertainment/productivity terms) versus the net payout per year -> I would wager that it is incredibly low, and people pirate not because it is just, or because of their subsistence lifestyle, but rather just because they CAN and they see it as a way of winning at the perceived zero-sum game of life.
Maybe students don't need to pirate XP/Office/Photoshop/etc. because they're using Linux/StarOffice/Gimp/etc.
Interesting story about this. My roommate was playing around with a pirated version of Photoshop the other day and was complaining because he couldn't take it to work where it would help him get his job done. So I suggested he try the Gimp. I pointed him to the download page for the windows version and he started playing around with it. He was so happy that it would make his job easier and that it had support for files that Photoshop didn't. I do believe he downloaded it at work. GNU wins over another one.
Um. Yeah. The quote, for everyone's edification:
Surveys of undergraduates at several public and private universities reveal the number of students who admit [emphasis my own] to using illegally copied "free" software remains high but dropped noticeably between 1996-97 and the 2000-01 school year.
Maybe people aren't admitting it because they're afraid that someone might actually start enforcing legislation like the NETA (No Electronic Theft Act) and DMCA against average users. Look at Sklyarov.
I'd like to think people are starting to buy stuff... but come on - do we really think the piracy norm has gone anywhere?
It may be cold, but at least it's clear.
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.
"Why buy a PhotoShop educational license when you can use GIMP for free and with no obligations? Why lock-in to properiatary apps?"
Because Photoshop supports many features REQUIRED by professional design and printing firms. Photoshop became the industry standard image editing application because it caters to the needs of the design community. Simply put, the GIMP does not.
Flash Course? In college? Where do they teach this properiatary junk? Flash is not something to be taught in an academic class that same way you won't teach about PEPSI to a food engineering student.
You seem to have a narrow realization of how broad the college experience can be. Climb out of your engineering hole. It's not CS or Software Engineering students who would take a course like Flash (usually). It's electronic arts and communications students. And flash is certainly a viable medium for art. Usually the medium is taught along with presentation and communication theory that works with it. (just what is the non-proprietary vector animation standard, anyway?)
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
If you want to warez your books, sell them to students instead of your bookstore, everyone wins in that deal. =]
What?
> 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]
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.
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."
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
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".
I truly believe that people pirate because life is a competition (whether acknowledged or not. Satisfaction for most people is not in achieving some standard of living, but rather in achieving a BETTER standard of living than the next guy), and piracy is one of the easiest ways to level the playing field (albeit unfairly): The goal is to have the most and do the most spending the least. Contrary to the Slashdot article's contention that software has achieved higher rates by incentives and non-RIAA tactics, I would say the reverse is true: Almost every game CD-ROM now either has advanced copy protection (ex. Operation Flashpoint), or it uses online verification that discourages serial number sharing and piracy (ex. Quake3). Many commercial application are hardware keyed and require internet authentication. On the warez scene the law has come down hard so formerly bustling IRC channels are ghost towns. Many of the people I know who formerly claimed to be able to get anything at anytime now have sources that have dried up. The spread of trojans and viruses has most people nervous about touching cracks, pirated software, etc. Indeed, I'd say "incentives" has absolutely nothing to do with the drop in piracy.
Would be a shame if your "Computer Science" education only prepared your for the job market and didn't teach you any computer science though, eh? I think that's what the OP was somewhat annoyed about and I agree. Computer science isn't about learning a trade; may as well become an apprentice. It's about learning mathematics, logic, and computability. Just because many schools offer a "Computer Science" dept that actually teaches "Software Engineering" doesn't mean that "Computer Science" equates to Java-hacking or something equally inane.
Your college education in Computer Science should teach you the ins and outs of the lambda calculus, higher-order functions, the nature of the computable, algorithm design and analysis, formal logic, etc... so on and so forth. You should have no trouble adapting to any sort of computer tools after that; your skills won't be obsolete in 3 years. What in the world does Flash have to do with all that? Do yourself a favor, go to a trade school if all you care about is learning trade-tools, and save yourself some money.
(Not that I object to taking classes in such tools, but they are far, far from what your focus should be)
Those who do not know the past are doomed to reimplement it, poorly.
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
You put software pirates into such black and white categories. I don't think it's as simple as that.
Pirating software has both negative and positive ramifications for the publishers. Game piracy is nearly 100% loss. I am sure there are some out there that try before they buy, but I would wager that they are few and far between. BUT application piracy is a bit more complicated: Take a budding graphic designer for example. He/she likely cannot afford the $300 + for photoshop/ect. Unfortunately the learning curve for photoshop is fairly steep and my guess would be that using university computers to learn it is fairly impractical. Therefore he/she pirates the software and LEARNS it. Eventually gets a job and uses a registered copy paid for by the company they work for. Seems to even itself out in my opinion.
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.
Piracy has seriously undermined the software industry for years:
Blah.. when people make this argument they don't seem to back it up. This is because there's no way to prove how much copying software affects companies' profits. There's no way to prove how much Napster affects the music industry's profits. There's no way to prove how much 'unsecured' computer hardware takes away from Disney's profits.
I will guess, and it's only a guess, that by far those who pirate software would not buy that software if it weren't available for free. You'll see a lot of commercial software supporters chanting, "every copy is a lost sale".. but they don't back up the claim! The software industry seems to be doing fine, by the way. Maybe nobody buys shareware, but maybe the reason is that 99% of shareware is crap.
Do these software guys blame free software as well? "Every copy of gnucash is a lost Quicken sale.." Really, what's the difference between addressing a need with gnucash or with Quicken, when the marginal cost of software is zero?
Just because the instructor changed the book, doesn't mean you have to buy the new one. Most of my profs will tell you that if you have the older edition, just keep it, as not much changed. I've actually seen instructors complain just as much as students about the publishers coming out with new versions every year.
What?
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.
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."
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
The college classes using Photoshop are typically geared towards poeple who will in turn use the software in a professional setting. They must learn how to deal with color management, different color spaces when when touching up photographs or perhaps designing texture maps for 3D animations or games. If the industry is using Photoshop for image editing, professional design and 3D work, it makes sense to teach the students on tools they will be using in the near future.
Another example I've come across has been the use of Maya in a college setting. Why not teach 3D Studio MAX or SoftImage or use a free tool like Blender? Because Maya is an industry standard tool for 3D animation. While MAX and SoftImage are used extensively in the industry, Maya is more common and is taught because of this.
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.
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.