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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)."
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.
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.
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
If you lose ANY of "the features that are included on the CD", then you got a shitty, probably home-brewed, release. No self-respecting warez group will settle for anything less than 100%, the only exception being online, multiplayer games that do cd-key verification with a central server each time you play them. There ARE "rips" out there, where groups will remove extraneous movies, music, speech, etc, but only for the purpose of getting the release size down so that people on dial-ups can handle the download. Given that most warez monkeys are computer-centric, they tend to have broadband and scoff at "rips".
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.
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...
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
exactly
:-P I won't get into that, because it's even more of a sham. My 2nd edition geology book has more information in it that the 7th edition that I had to pay 100 bucks for!
I see people in my class shelling out 100 bucks for adobe illustrator, which they will use for 5 assignments and then let sit on a shelf. Yeah, I warezd the latest version so I could do my assignments (cartography map making) I'm not going to pay for crap just for one class.
I'd warez the books if I could
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
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?
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.
I don't know about your school, but all the ones I have been to have all the software you need in all the labs and libraries on the computers there. If you're living in a dorm, it's not like it'll kill ya to spend a couple of hours on campus in the library/lab would it?
What?
Why a Flash Course? Because Flash is a tool to do a job, just like Photoshop, GIMP, Dreamweaver, or Notepad. Being able to use the tools that are available to you is part of being a good programmer. You may not like seeing Flash on a website, but it does have its place as a useful tool. For example, I've been using it and Shockwave Director for the past two years to make interactive maps of the college campus for one of the university departments.
I wish my college would teach courses in Flash or Shockwave or other such proprietary applications. Like it or not, many companies expect their programming team to be able to use such applications. If I were asked "Can you use Flash?" at a job interview, I'd rather answer "Yes, my college education as a Computer Science major taught me the ins-and-outs of Flash." rather then "Flash? I'll see that proprietary piece of trash burn in Hell!"
Yes, my university provides free access to things such as GCC and Espresso via the computer labs or Telnet, but the proprietary tools that are commonly required or preferred by students (including AutoCAD and several different compilers for several different programming languages) are also available for sale at the academic rate in the college computer shop and provided free for use in the computer labs (which are stocked with Win2K, Mac, and Unix stations).
All in all, I'd rather be exposed to and educated in these proprietary applications to better prepare me for the job market.
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
> I'd warez the books if I could
It's called photocopying. Well, ok, not exactly like warezing, but it still can be many times cheaper than to buy the book.
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 disagree. As a CS major who doesn't pirate anything (Linux is free, thanks), I am constantly telling friends to "feed the programmers" as they warez crap left and right at a MB/s from a LAN direct connect hub, only to be constantly told "fuck the programmers."
> (just what is the non-proprietary vector animation standard, anyway?)
SVG, or Scalable Vector Graphics, which also includes a mobile version and also caters for disabled users and non standard display devices.
There are tools to author it such as Jasc WebDraw, and it can be displayed on a significant proportion of browsers (IE is the only browser I know supports it, Mozilla probably does too).
Actually, the reason many people pirate software is the fact that you can't try it first. How many games have I bought that got good reviews, looked fantastic in the box, even had nice promo-clips, and once they got installed.... sucked? I have a whole shelf full of them. They got installed, played somewhere between once and a dozen times, and uninstalled. $50 each, for between 1 and 12 hours of entertainment.
Now, OTOH, I have purchased quite a few games AFTER having obtained a pirated copy and liking it. Why? Lots of reasons... you get the manual, you get updates and bugfixes without having to wait for the crackers to catch up, and... gee... it seems fair to purchase something you actually enjoy using.
Guess what the other big factor in piracy is? They usually WORK BETTER than the official release! Yes indeed, I usually do go looking for cracks for my legitimately purchesed games so that I don't have to constanly swap cd's because I feel like playing more than one game a day. I paid money for the game, but the copy protection not only makes it annoying, but increases wear-and-tear on my equipment (Blizzard! Your Diablo II protection knocked one my cdrom drives out of alignment, thanks!).
If I could go down to the Quik-E-Mart and rent a new game (as I do a movie, or a playstaton game), I wouldn't mind spending $5 to try MondoMan XII for a few days, then spending $50 if I'm hooked. But I can't justify spending $50 for Blort's Great Adventure, only to discover it was a Fishing Adventure and I'd have been better off watching the paint dry on my wall.
Bottom Line: Make the game worthwhile. If it can hold my attention, I'll happily pay for it.
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.
If you want to warez your books, sell them to students instead of your bookstore, everyone wins in that deal. =]
I have found that the instructors do their damned best to change the text as frequently as possible. In this respect, the book becomes useless for anyone at the school so selling to students isn't even an option.
Do what I did: round everyone's books up, pile them up in a parking lot on campus and set them on fire. I realize that this is a waste but it got lots of press and brought the students' frustration to the public.
Although it hasn't been dealt with, they are currently investigating instructor "kick backs" from the text manufacturers. This is commonplace. What we need is for the professors who write their own texts to "open source" them for other professors to use and modify freely.
The internet is a huge resource of mostly free material. There isn't any reason that text books can't go to the wayside.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
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.
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.
it started in 1988 actually:
;-)
but any internet tech that goes back farther than the web is old enough
Let's focus on the issue of college students here. I agree with your assessment that people are willing to pay for certian things and not others. Ever wonder why? For starters, the vast majority of college students have no idea how to budget their money. They simply live hand to mouth. Have you ever seen those commercials that Visa used to run about college students spending out of control and wracking up huge debts? There is a reason for that...
;)
The second problem is one that is central to the concept of economics, scarcity. Human beings have an unlimited desire for goods and services, but production capacity and natural resources do not enjoy such a luxury. Most goods depend on natural resources, such as food, cars and houses. They cannot be copied. Software, music, and movies are in a different classification because their scarcity is somewhat artificial. The media upon which they are delivered is scarce, but the information on that media can be duplicated endlessly (for all practical purposes). This breaks the fundemental economic structure. Given that people have such a voracious appetite for consumption, and the limits on said consumption have effectively been removed, people will continue to "pirate" software and music.
(Side note: Some folks will pay for everything they consume, some will pay for a fraction, others will never pay for anything they don't absolutely have to. Exploring the reasons for that is more of a psychology issue than an economic one. Don't assume everyone's motivation is as simple as trying to win a zero-sum game.)
Here's the perennial question: How do people make money off of a good that ceases to be scarce? I don't claim all the answers, but a couple of trite phrases jump to mind:
1) Keep it simple, stupid!
2) You catch more flies with honey than vinager
It's foolish to expect a person to pay a premium price for something that is simply not scarce. You must provide other incentive for them to pay (and penalty of law isn't as good of an incentive as you might think.
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.
I'll have to agree with this concept. Up until a few years ago, I was downloading all the warez I could. Finally realized that I never played any of the games I downloaded, I just downloaded them to download them.
Last November, one of my friends got a copy of RtCW, I got a copy of it, to play the single player, I had the intention of buying it, just not at that moment. A few weeks later, Circuit City had it for $30, so I bought it, even though I had already beaten the game off the copy.
I think as most people grow older and more mature, they realize what buying a game means. Its like the whole concept of warezing games (and applications too, I guess) doesn't mean anything any more. If you want a game, you buy it. You might get a copy and try it, but you later buy it.
Thats my take on it anyway. Right now, I can't play any games, not with Calculus and the fact that my Winblows box has been running for close to 5wks (ph33r the power of Windows 98) and it doesn't do anything.
BTW, I wonder what the record is for most ISOs downloaded over a dialup connection? I'd bet I downloaded 50+ ISOs over dialup, back in the day (still on dialup).
I can't actually think of a single person I know who has a legal copy of anything above windows 95.
What MS realizes is that they are running out of "new releases" of Windows. This is why most official licenses come phsyically affixed to the PC in question. Since you can't get the license off of the PC (they are designed to destroy themselves if removed), you can't transfer the license. This should be illegal! Once the license has been purchased, there is no reason that it can't be used on new PCs. This frightens MS since it would effectively eliminate the need to sell an OS, sooner or later. I currently see no need to move from Windows 2k in the next 5-10 years (unless Linux becomes viable for me).
What the DOJ needs to do is require MS to license individuals instead of PCs. If someone has already purchased an XP license, then they should be able to buy a PC without the MS tax and simply register it under their name. The DOJ should also REQUIRE PC vendors to itemize the cost of the operating system on new PC sales. This would cause consumers to become cost-conscious of the MS-tax of which MS has done a good job to hide. Once this happens, Linux becomes more viable and consumers stop throwing away Windows licenses with their old PC.
But who is gonna listen?
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
First of all, those nifty extras on a CD/DVD are not "service", they are "product". They'll be copied just like everything else.
Second, selling service and giving the product away for free is a terrible business model in most cases. Why? In order to sell more service, you have to have a more difficult to use program, and vice versa. This is called a WIN-LOSE situation.
Selling the product and giving away service means that you must make the product as easy and powerful as possible, in order to reduce the service costs. This is called a WIN-WIN situation.
Why was this parent thread marked as +5 insightful?
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