Overture Search Terms Showcase Piracy Desire

swfnews guy writes: "swfnews.com (a slashcode based site) today published this article regarding how Overture's search term suggested tool can be used to see the desired piracy of a particular piece of software. I find it disturbing that more people searched for the crack for Flash Mx than for tutorials on how to use it."

Comments

Piracy Spiral

[Apreche]

Software piracy is a spiral of doom. Software developers claim that prices on software are high because of large amounts of piracy. They claim they lose lots of money because of it. People pirate software because it is so expensive. "Back in the day" just about every program was 50$. Adobe Photoshop, which is a standard program that lots of people need costs $584 at www.buy.com. That's well over what most people can afford. It's half the price of an extremely decent computer! Flash MX is $198. If these programs were say 50$, I would buy them. But since I am not a pirate, I have to suffer and not have them on my pc. I am lucky that at college I can go to certain labs and use my school's license, but most people can not.
Programs like WS_FTP have the right idea. If you are a business user or a company looking to use the software you have to pay up. But if you are a home user who isn't profiting off of the use of the software, then its absolutely free.
If companies like Microsoft, Adobe, and Macromedia provided free licenses, or even cheap sub 100$ licenses to individuals not seeking to profit from the use of the software I guarantee they would see an extreme decrease in piracy. There are those cheap people who wont pay 50$ for a very powerful piece of software, but there are a lot of people like me, college students, who can't afford a 500$ program that they need for a class.
Software price increases because of piracy and vice versa. One day it will either end where all software is pirated because nobody can afford it, or all software is cheap(er). In the end it doesn't look good for the developers.

Nothing new...

[Tazzy531]

There's nothing new about this "news" article. We all know piracy runs pretty rampant on the net. We all know that many (including us), justify it by saying that

• It's too expensive
• I'm just using it for educational purposes
• I wouldn't have bought it anyways

People have been saying this since the mid-90s where we were downloading "warez" from BBS's.

Piracy could be mostly stopped

[br0ken by design]

By the companies doing one thing:
Offering noncommercial use licenses on full software products, at a NOMINAL[1] cost,
while aggressively pursuing companies that violate the noncommerical licenses.
This would allow the kids who want to play with ($software), make wacky animations, programs and such to do so without breaking the law, while charging the people that make money off of flash the full license fee.
There's even an added benefit - a lot more people will learn ($software), and will potentially become paying customers in the future (this especially applies to younger people).
Educational software is not the answer, as it's only open to students, and often times is *still* too highly priced for many people that just want to fool around.

I think piracy would be greatly reduced if the software companies would recognize that a lot of the warezing is being done because the price is too high for people that just want to 'play' and not actually do any for-profit work.

:wq
[1] under $100. Just media with PDF'd docs.