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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.
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
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?
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).
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.
it started in 1988 actually:
;-)
but any internet tech that goes back farther than the web is old enough
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.