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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."
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.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Now if they would just tell us which search actually returned the desired results... ;)
"I'm just here to regulate funkyness." - James Gandolfini, as Winston in The Mexican
This guy did, and there's some amusing results....
http://www.chiprowe.com/articles/searchterms.html
+anal +sandwich!?!?!?
I can't even imagine what that is.
--
Don't sweat the petty things, and don't pet the sweaty things.
In fact, I've got a hunch that a lot of these guys will turn out to be great Macromedia customers in a few years once they've honed their skills on the cracked version, and enter the real world of web page design where they can A) Afford the software and B) Write it off as a tax deduction.
Now, I'm not justifying the piracy, and it doesn't make it any less illegal. I just don't think its a big deal when you look at the total picture.
People have been saying this since the mid-90s where we were downloading "warez" from BBS's.
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
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.
One ring to rule them all. The (_O_) in Goatse.cx
Flash, Photoshop, and even MS Office are all products not designed for ordinary consumers. They're just not. They're packed with features and tools for professionals, and those professionals are trying to make money with this software. The least they can do is ante up a few hours worth of their own fees to pay for the tools they use.
If you're a consumer, and you want a cheap product, the vendors are there for you. MS Office cost too much for your school papers? Get a copy of Works. Photoshop expensive for making web graphics and removing red-eye? Get Photoshop Elements for a fraction of the price.
Meanwhile, Macromedia Flash is the perfect example of a tool not targetted at consumers, period. The tutorial takes a couple of hours to get through, minimum, when you're starting from scratch, and ActionScript is hardly a walk in the park.
You say you'd buy Flash MX for $50. Well, what are you going to do with it? Goof around and build crappy animated interfaces for your web site? Or learn to use it properly and sell yourself as a Flash professional? If it's the latter, then take a class or pay for the full product, and justify the $50/hour your peers are charging. If it's the former, just learn JavaScript. It's still free.
But these companies do have a right to set the price they want to do a transaction at;
If that means $584 for Photoshop, then that's what you need to fork over. If you don't like it... doesn't mean you have the right or privilege to download or use it.
Then there's the $89 version of Photoshop Elements.
Or you can get an older, cheaper version of Photoshop. Photoshop 5.5, 5.0, 4.0. 3.0, all worked, and continue to work today.
Or you can use gimp.
If you can't afford to use the program, you can't afford to use the program, and that's how simple it is.
If you *need* the program, then you can afford it. If a $584 copy of Photoshop allows you to earn $30,000 a year in consultation fees, you can afford Photoshop.
If you just want to put pictures on the web... use the $89 of Photoshop.
GPL Deconstructed
Lets stop all the whoopla about Warez. Be realistic -- it doesn't cost businesses a thing. Most people who d/l Warez wouldn't have paid the steep price for the program anyways, so companies lose no money. They're just using it as an excuse to keep prices arbitrarily high. The average person who d/l's a pirated version of PowerPoint would never fork over the absurd $300 that MS is demanding for Power Point. Come on, this is pure bullshit. Like they actually produce any REAL updates anyways. Powerpoint today is basically the same as it was in '97. I'm not willing to pay more than 50 bucks for great games -- and these are pieces of software which actually involved real work to make, which actually did evolve, and which cost a lot of money to make. If you tell me it cost Outrage a lot of money to make Descent 3, I'll buy into that argument. If you tell me it cost MS a lot of money to upgrade PowerPoint 2000 to PowerPoint XP, I say that's a load of fucking bullshit.
As for people searching for Warez via search engines, that's mostly useless. Even using cross referencing, its difficult to get a good Warez page. 99% of all "warez" pages are really fronts for pop-up porno operations. When it comes to Warez, you really need to "be in" to be able to access it.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Keyword Clicks/ Cost-Per- Cost/
Day Click Day
---
flash 660.0 $0.19 $123.42
crack 690.0 $0.12 $77.55
porn 1600.0 $0.24 $368.12
sex 1600.0 $0.24 $376.00
cowboy neal 0.1 $0.08 $0.02
flash mx crack <0.1 $0.11 $0.00
By that logic, I would have more success buying the keywords "cowboy neal" than with "flash mx crack." That's what scares me. Try it yourself.
Uhhh.. except that if you're a musician (as opposed to a music label) you make most of your money through live concerts, and you really only make a pittance off the albums themselves.
I'm just trying to picture the guys at Macromedia live at the Arco Arena hammering out code, panties flying on stage, fans screaming...
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ