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Software Industry Shifting Piracy Strategy
Sensible Clod writes "The U.S. software industry's strategy against global software piracy is shifting to focus on claimed economic benefits of copyright protection in response to a new study released by the BSA, according to an article at Internet News. The study concluded that countries with high software piracy rates have more to gain economically by protecting intellectual property rights. The study even claims potential global gains of '2.4 million new jobs, $400 billion in economic growth and $67 billion in new tax revenues' by cutting the current global software piracy rate of 35% by 10%."
What on earth is the "rate" of software piracy? This sounds awfully like more mystical math from an industry with a lot of motivation to deceive.
I'd love to know how software piracy hurts software vendors without spin put on it. Lately I tried a rom of Final fantasy Tactics Advance. On Monday I'll be going into the local game shop to purchase it. I've done this countless times on games I wouldn't have played other wise. So for every game I randomly downloaded and enjoyed I've added a sale. For every game I've downloaded and didn't like I've not taken anything away.. are these figures ever taken into account? No, because if people admit piracy just about balances out or may even help a company they'd have to stop using rootkits and DRM to take away your basic right to copy things for self use.
I like muppets.
how will poor countries suddenly become rich just by fighting piracy? I mean, don't tax revenues come from MONEY EARNED BY THE PEOPLE? And how will people pay taxes on some money they DON'T HAVE in the first place?
Yet another flawed "OMG look at all those stolen CD's we could earn so much money with this stuff" study.
Perhaps if Microsoft stopped charging $200 for Windows and $2000 for Visual Studio, more people would buy their products legit.
The study concluded that countries with high software piracy rates have more to gain economically by protecting intellectual property rights.
Given who conducted the study, the conclusion is hardly surprising.
"She's furniture with a pulse"
'2.4 million new jobs, $400 billion in economic growth and $67 billion in new tax revenues'
It's interesting that these BSA studies always assume that the money that is not spent on software is not spent anywhere else either.
It'll probably take more than 2.4 million new jobs, $400 billion in government spending and $67 billion in from tax revenues to cut the current global software piracy rate of 35% by 10%. Consider costs involved in prison and oversight of the millions of copyright violators, ignoring the burden of catching violators.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
I'm no expert in economics, but the numbers quoted in TFA just don't make sense to me. I feel like there is a hidden assumption in this analysis. They are saying that countries that currently have massive "piracy" would, if only "piracy" were elimianted, have a gigantic boom in their IT sector. They say that Russia and China would see a massive increase in IT jobs and so forth.
I don't think so. They are assuming that there is a limitless demand for IT professionals that is not currently being satisfied. I don't think this is the case. These countries have a host of other economic and political problems that lead to many things, including not respecting other countrie's copyrights (oh no!) and having limited jobs for IT professionals. If they suddenly enforced copyright (and by this, it is implicitly meant the copyright of other countries) I don't think there would suddenly be a huge demand for copyright-enforcing bureaucracy.
I just don't see why people who are used to making copies without obtaining permission will go along with, and support, such a system. Frankly the point of the whole article is "other countries have this nifty law that lets the government tax ethereal things... and it lets companies sue lots of people for ethereal things! These countries are rich! Do you want to be rich? All you have to do is impose laws that manage ethereal things (like ideas), and *poof* you have wealth out of thin air!"
I don't believe in generating fictitious wealth using laws. It's barely sustainable for the countries that are doing it now; I just don't see how it would make sense for countries that don't have a history of such laws.
BSA was established in 1988. It took 17 years for them to realize that less piracy = increased income AND increased income = more room for growth increased income = increased tax revenue ?
2.4 million new jobs, $400 billion in economic growth and $67 billion in new tax revenues All in India.
2.4 million new jobs...
I think they mean 24,000 new jobs which in the US earn $100,000/year each. Outsourced overseas, that would be 2.4 million jobs at $1000/year each.
That's the same math they use to count a single 40x CD burner as 40 burners when they bust a piracy ring.
cure cancer, the common cold and aid. IT will also result in zero-point energy power plants, and FTL vehicles. The benefits if IP patents just keep rolling in...
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
The huge amount of money these companies make from record sales seems to have no place to go. Innovation isn't in great amount, but traditional styles of thinking and cut-throat business tactics seem to be. They seem to not know where to spend it, so they use it to fight piracy to try to make more. They just don't have the minds recruited to be able to plan out and detail market strategies that could take advantage of the person who downloads a rom to try it, so he could buy a game later at Gamestop when catching a movie with his girlfriend. They don't think about how a friend listening to a tune on the internet has more influence on possible album purchases (because that friend just may happen to send that song to you, illegally perhaps, but intentionally to get you into the song), when focusing on that could get a person into a band if they could download some good quality singles from the cd for free. There doesn't seem to be trust in artists either - if a single doesn't sell millions of copies, it's considered a failure. Most bands work by building a fan base, and sharing the music online builds that base much quicker than releasing copy protected cd's that could damage a person's computer.
Also, 127.92 million manufacturing and engineering jobs will be lost because nations with tough IP laws lose the competitive edge brought by investment (both foreign and domestic) in R&D and technological development, 143.84 million additional lawyers will need to be trained to enforce newly implemented IP laws, and 538 trillion dollars will be lost over the next thirty years as the economic output of heavily-IP-restricted onetime global heavyweights drops to next to zero.
See? Making up numbers is fun, and very educational. But I'll bet mine are just as accurate.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The money you save by pirating software will just be spent on other things you can't pirate... like hardware. The government still gets its sales tax no?
against global software piracy and potential global gains . . . .
Why is everything nowdays called global: "global warming", "the global war on terror", and now "global software piracy". It suggests that things are all around the world the same. Well, let me tell you, those people in Pakistan that survived the earthquake, would hope for a little "global warming", as long as it happens in their village and this winter of course. But I digress...
Why don't people start solving their problems at home? Probably it has to do with the fact that when you call your issues "global", or at least your plans for/against it, there is lesser chance that you get attacked. You can always claim that you do it to protect / help / save all those other global citizens. So, just a new type of CYA.
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
The problem that these people fail to see is that third-world countries can't afford to pay the "normal" (i.e US) prices for software. The numbers the BSA is throwing around is just mind-boggling... $ 400B in economic growth, what the fsck ever. I don't think most of those people would actually replace their pirated copies with the original, just because they can't afford it.
The message they're trying to convey is "OMG that's all we're missing out on because of piracy?", but it doesn't hold water. I'm not condoning piracy, but it really pisses me off when I see the "guys in the suits" blabbering inane propaganda and throwing around numbers to justify their existence.
And if the study includes PC games in the "pirated software" category, this makes it even worse, because the numbers will be again vastly inflated. In third-world countries, copies cost anywhere from $1 to $3, so anyone who goes out and buys games wouldn't leave without at least 3 DVDs, even they never play the games they bought. Which wouldn't be true if the prices were in the $35-55 range.
Or will that be lawyers who earn their money in patent cases?
Somehow something is very very wrong with the reasoning that if people would have paid for what they pirated there would be a lot more money in the economy. If every one had unlimited money, then yes, ok, but then there would be unlimited money already. The whole point of money is that you can spend it only once.
Money that is not spend on a software product, because it is obtained illegally, is not mysteriously "lost", and can not be magically "recovered" by a reduction of piracy.
I can understand that a software company prefers people paying, and that that helps the financial situation of that particular company. But you can't just add up all virtual losses, and state that that is the total amount of money that will magically pop up when everybody would be paying.
Adobe/Macromedia/MS wouldnt have such a huge market penetration. Young pirated software users are the key. Get them hooked onto your product and most likely when they grow up they will buy your software. Kinda like me :)
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I think the BSA has it wrong.. usually you end up with MORE money when you DON'T SPEND IT! Apparently the BSA lives in REVERSO-LAND, where paying Adobe $500 for PhotoShop makes YOU RICH!
This is bullshit, plain and simple. Gestapo style tatics aren't working, so they now switch tracks to just spewing outright lies. 2.4 million in jobs ? 400 billion in economic growth ? Hmmm... oh wait... next it will cure AIDS! Anything but the truth...
Using GNU/Linux -- Windows-free zone!
Well at least the BSA is wanting to protect the income of various quality software such as MS office,Visual Studio, WoW , 3ds max, photoshop
Unlike the MPAA with crappy movies or the RIAA with Briteny Spheres.
Though I am aware that the BSA considers the GPL software is pirated because its free and refuses to defend ip of quality programs like Apache, Linux(the Kernel), etc
How can a company that is created in lets say, Argentina and has some innovative product compete against the WMDs of the super companies: marketing, adds, paid "researchers" and gossipy columnists, cutthroat lawyers, etc etc.?
True competition died a long time ago in capitalism (have you seen the film Tucker?). Bug companies rule. If somebody has any great superprofitable idea, the idea and the one who had it is in turn bought by the huge capitals.
This article is ridiculous. But not stupid. This is how all the imperialist scams are sold to "developing" (read semi-colonial) countries.
Stop trying to catch pirates. Charge a fair price for stable software with good tech support and consistent upgrades and patches. Users pay for the support now and in the future. They pay for the official version to protect against viruses and spyware.
I'm anti-copyright so I see how software is worthless based on supply and demand. Companies can't protect the bits, they can only charge for the physical portion and service.
By ending the policing, they can lower their prices, bringing in more users. Data has no value if its infinitely available. It is how you package data and what value added services you provide that have value.
The study concluded that countries with high software piracy rates have more to gain economically by protecting intellectual property rights.
No, the countries that export copyrighted goods have more to gain economically if they can convince the countries that import copyrighted goods to act against their own best interests and strengthen their copyright terms.
For instance, if Chinese people pay $2bn to foreign companies every year for copyrighted goods, but only make $1bn from exporting copyrighted goods, they could save $1bn instantly by abolishing copyright. They could also make money by exporting foreign copyrighted goods themselves at a lower cost that the copyright holders.
As I understand it, the reason why countries don't generally do this is because they would incur the wrath of the USA and face economic sanctions. Basically, the USA bullies them into kowtowing.
As for the people who openly admit to piracy anyway, you're not looking too hot yourself. If there were no alternative, I'd not only advocate stealing, but take over the whole damn building and shove the CEOs off the balcony, while you're at it being a pirate: get your eyepatch and your parrot and do it all the way! But free software *is* out there, and it's not just struggling along, it's coming out *on* *top* in many ways - so now how do you explain that rather than use the free alternative (which you can even rewrite to your liking and SELL), you'd instead steal the pay-stuff?
Why not just use the free software and cut both the suit-and-tie crooks and the pirate crooks out of the equation altogether? Because regardless of how you got it, USING the stolen stuff profits the corporation ANYWAY. (It's publicity for them: "So good people steal it!", It drives other people to go out and buy it to be compatible with what you use. It perpetuates the fallacy that their product is worth anything at all.) You're busting your ass to support a system which you show, by your own actions, you don't believe in!
Final score: Corporations: (-1), Consumers: (-1). Hey, boys? The field is *that* way.
"The trouble is with the 80% of the people out there that aren't like you. They're selfish, short-sighted, and simply have the "you made it, I want it" philosophy. They enjoy the game that someone else worked to create and never will do anything for that person that helped make their life a little more enjoyable."
And the majority of those 80% wouldn't buy the damned product in the first place. In effect, nothing is really lost - those people would not be paying even if they couldn't commit copyright infringement. Indeed, benefit may actually be gained, because those people might spread free advertising about how great X is.
The U.S. software industry's strategy against global software piracy is shifting to focus on claimed economic benefits of copyright protection in response to a new study released by the BSA...
Why would the Boy Scouts of America be interested in Software Piracy?
all this while the latest statistics show that consumer debt here in the US is at its highest ever, and savings is at an all time low.. which of course means that more and more people are basically spending all they take in (if not more) and saving next to nothing.
And all that, of course, gets taxed... consumer spending, whether as sales tax to the states, or tax on the income of the company selling the product...
So let me get this straight, more and more people are in essence "maxed out", but they think that if they 'crack down' on piracy, people will rush out to buy their (cough cough) $600 office suite (or $800 photo package, or - insert your price and sofware here). Sure, it might increase the profits of the credit card companies.. of course, then it would probably also increase the default rate, which are losses that offset their profits (and reduce their taxes).
Of course, "globally", we can take that guy in some 3rd world country to whom that $600 office package is an entire month of rent/food/gas and can barely make it by, and arrest them! yeah! throw them in jail and *pay* $1000's (or 10's of $1000's in the US) to house them and feed them in a jail.
Makes you wonder when a good portion of the prisons in this country are 'privatized', and those corporations have been making good profits in recent years. and, if we lock up even *more* people...
Of course, credit card bankruptcies, prisons, law enforcement, the judges, all of that basically *screws* the rest of the law-abiding people because taxes will go up to pay for all that.
Microsoft's branch in charge of Office made 11 billion dollars last year. 8 of which was pure profit.
These people don't charge that much because it cost them that much to make, but because they can. This is a business which relies solely on ripping people off for as much as they can. When that's your business dynamic, of course people are going to pirate. Especially those that can't afford the software, be it students or those living in the poorer asian states. I mean the BSA gets most of its piracy loss figures from China/Vietnam, where the pirated software rate is 92/90% respectively. And yet, the software in most case costs more than their annual wages.
Things have been this way for 20 years. And, for 20 years, people have been pirating. It won't stop until they stop.
BSA - I grokked that as "Bull Shit Artists" .... how apt :)
Software piracy has got to be the most overlooked form if piracy. thepiratebay has 1.8 million downloads of Quake 4 clocked (not sure if they are complete, but that's 1.8 million potential sales), and I think I remember Doom 3 having like 30,000 seeds at it's peak. It dissapoints me as a potential software developer since the developers often get shafted from what I've seen (I recall reading the Publisher gets almost as much if not more money then the developer in many cases from sales). As much as I hate the RIAA's scare tactics, a little bit of them is a necessary evil to prevent people from pirating (not suing as many people as possible like the RIAA does). Without any risk, people have absolutely no reason to stop....
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
BSA says:
In Soviet Russia, copyright laws make YOU rich!
No, wait...
how does underdeveloped countries benefit themselves by sending millions of dollars to the US and feeding the super rich software companies that effectively prevent any small comany in these countries to flourish?
;) (the original Brain virus was written in Pakistan to spite Westerners who could afford a trip to Pakistan to buy pirated copies of software, but were too cheap to pay full price for software, even though full price software would have cost less than the flight... Pakistanis (who didn't have the money), would get "genuine" pirated copies of Lotus 1-2-3, WordStar, WordPerfect or whatever, while the Westerners would get the "infected" version, as a punishment)
They send viruses instead
Next up, the BSA will attempt to prove that black is white, and then get run down on the next zebra corssing.
"She's furniture with a pulse"
I'm sure that the new campaign will be successful, and Vietnamese and North Korean families will gladly pay one year's salary for Windows rather than pirated copies for dirt after hearing what the BSD has to say about their "massive losses". Tossing them still-expensive bones like "Windows Start Edition" isn't helping your cause either.
Does it make piracy right (the fact that they cannot afford it)? No, but it (piracy) is creating a future market so that when they can afford the products as their economy develops, they will likely start buying legit copies. "Piracy" helped Windows, Norton Antivirus, AutoCAD, and Adobe Photoshop gain the market share they now control, why should they end the 'free trial' system now?
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
BSA or just BS?
May 19th 2005
From The Economist print edition
Software theft is bad; so is misstating the evidence
IT SOUNDS too bad to be true; but, then, it might not be true. Up to 35% of all PC software installed in 2004 was pirated, resulting in a staggering $33 billion loss to the industry, according to an annual study released this week by the Business Software Alliance (BSA), a trade association and lobby group.
Such jaw-dropping figures are regularly cited in government documents and used to justify new laws and tough penalties for pirates--this month in Britain, for example, two people convicted of piracy got lengthy prison sentences, even though they had not sought to earn money. The BSA provided its data. The judge chose to describe the effects of piracy as nothing less than "catastrophic".
Intellectual property
But while the losses due to software copyright violations are large and serious, the crime is certainly not as costly as the BSA portrays. The association's figures rely on sample data that may not be representative, assumptions about the average amount of software on PCs and, for some countries, guesses rather than hard data. Moreover, the figures are presented in an exaggerated way by the BSA and International Data Corporation (IDC), a research firm that conducts the study. They dubiously presume that each piece of software pirated equals a direct loss of revenue to software firms.
To derive its piracy rate, IDC estimates the average amount of software that is installed on a PC per country, using data from surveys, interviews and other studies. That figure is then reduced by the known quantity of software sold per country--a calculation in which IDC specialises. The result: a (supposed) amount of piracy per country. Multiplying that figure by the revenue from legitimate sales thus yields the retail value of the unpaid-for software. This, IDC and BSA claim, equals the amount of lost revenue.
The problem is that the economic impact of global software piracy is far harder to calculate. Some academics have shown that some piracy actually increases software sales, by introducing products to people who would not otherwise become customers. Indeed, Bill Gates chirped in the 1990s that piracy in China was useful to Microsoft, because once the nation was hooked, the software giant would eventually figure out a way to monetise the trend. (Lately Microsoft has kept quiet on this issue.)
The BSA's bold claims are surprising, given that last year the group was severely criticised for inflating its figures to suit its political aims. "Absurd on its face" and "patently obscene" is how Gary Shapiro, boss of the Consumer Electronics Association, another lobby group, describes the new ranking.
My math may suck but this is a ridiculous claim.
Totally eradicate piracy and theres:
$1400 Billion growth.
8.4 million new jobs
$584.5 billion in tax
Lets have a new law which says that if any study makes untrue claims, then the companies behind that study are liable for any financial imbalance.
I for one am sick of all these blatent lies.
Are you really serious? $200 for Windows? Even if most people paid that much, droppign the price isn't going to do anything. People either don't ever pay for Windows, or they're happy to pay it and be done with it (like myself). Most people, quite honestly, would probably pay significantly more for Windows, also (I would).
I don't respond to AC's.
I don't trust anything that comes from a bunch of liars like the BSA.
If you get this, we're 10 of a kind.
BSA is for impotents.
Confuse people via the media.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Draconian anti-piracy measures: bring them on! The more the closed-source software annoys end users, the more they'll be drawn to one of the understated advantages of Free Software - simpler licensing*. If you want to give Illustrator to 10 users, good luck dealing with Adobe's Premium Super Extreme Titanium Ultimate Extra Power Partners, who will take a month to send you a license key, and an incorrect password to access it. Contrast that with the alternative: "Download Inkscape, install it". Any company which places barriers in front of being a legitimate customer deserves to go out of business.
In any case, I find the argument that buying more software boosting any economy highly dubious. There is a fixed cost in creating software - actually writing it - the putting it in boxes and selling it part is virtually free by comparison. If you increase your sales by 10%, that's money straight into the software company's pockets. Compare this to a traditional industry, where the money would be going to suppliers, and suppliers of suppliers, and so on. Most software (at least, the stuff the BSA is protecting) is developed in the USA, so if a country was to fight piracy, the end result would be a whole lot more money leaving the country and enriching the richest. It would do basically nothing for the home economy**. In fact, it will almost certainly damage most economies to fight piracy. Company profits will fall if they are forced to legitimise their systems, and money will be redirected from investments in locally produced products. This does not, of course, take account of any moral arguments, but then the BSA weren't making one either on these points, so why do their job for them? Since it would require a charitable assumption that these figures were not created to give the "right" answer, rather than produced as a logical conclusion from facts, it appears the BSA has no morals in any case, and is only concerned with profit. If this is the case, they have no place to complain when people increase their profits by copying software.
* Yes, I am aware there are eleventy billion free licenses out there, but they are all effectively the same if you don't touch the source, i.e. they say "Why yes, you may install me as much as you want"
** Obvious joke here noted, thankyou.
When will they release a study that finds affordable software prices sell more software and limits piracy?
:)
:) Dare i say, they are pirating software to IMPROVE the standard of life of all, giving ALL a fair chance to enjoy life in a world that says if you cant "pay" you cant play. A world that would leave the poor behind only because they cant afford to buy food.
;)
Thats the real truth. Even the pirates understand that
You think they pirate software because they're trying to undermine their local economies?
The pirates arent going anywhere because the companies keep treating people like cash batteries. They're people that deserve a fair chance to enjoy $5000 software packages.
Jesus would pirate software
What really makes me sick about this less piracy = profit campaign is that here in Finland most of the press reported BSA's numbers of new jobs and money as facts without any objectivity.
As if those jobs wouldn't be going to cheaper countries, and like, has anyone ever heard of, or pirated software from Finland??
As soon as people have to pay for it 80% of the software houses out there will dry up and blow away.
Software pricing is heinous as is music and video pricing.
Lower the price and people won't really need to or want to pirate software.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
For the majority of consumers, software is an overhead commodity that takes money out of their local economy and send it somewhere else.
OpenSource options allow for the majority of that money to remain in the local economy. Money that can be spend on local tech support and customization for those not so technically inclined.
Think of the school boards who pay M$ license fees...tax payers dollars from around the world shipped to Redmond.
If they want to argue economics, lets look at the total economic picture and paint a picture that shoots holes in their numbers.
1a)Write software that does what your customers want it to
(for example, -for beginners- an easy interface that does what a User thinks it should do, that GETS OUT OF THE WAY for more knowledgable users)
2a)Debug BEFORE it ships
2b)Provide REAL support after it ships even for (wait for it...) a FEE! -as long as the fee is explained before the purchase and seems reasonable TO THE CUSTOMER* )
3)Charge a price that seems reasonable TO THE CUSTOMER...
( if a customer thinks ther is better VALUE from a Purchase than from an act of so-called 'piracy', that customer will be more likely to BUY! Price is important - if something is too expensive, I CAN'T buy it.... Value is MORE important - If I think something is a rip-off, I WON'T buy it)
4) PROFIT!
In other news, rich people buy more cars. If you want to be rich, buy a new car -- just like rich people do.
What's he's saying is:
"Its like trying to sell sno-cones at the North Pole. It can be done, but you've got to offer more than ice to make the sale"
There you go. Not a perfect analogy. Well, actually it is. You may not be smart enough to see all the nuances of what I'm saying, but perhaps the important part will make it through.
a) like entertainment downloads, no doubt they are counting on every tom dick or harry installing a pirated copy of office actually uses the software and would otherwise fork out the $700 if they couldn't simply download it for evaluation
b) fine, that extra $400 billion has to come from somewhere so that is that amount not available to develop and expand non-software products, like food and shelter for some and beer and parties for others
How exactly is this "shifting strategy"? To me it just seems like they are looking at what they have to gain by cutting software piracy, not thinking up some new strategy. Maybe they could decrease software piracy by setting prices that accurately reflect the quality of their products.
The countries that have the highest amount of software piracy are those countries who's citizens earn such a low annual income that they simply cannot afford to buy the software. To enforce against software piracy in such countries is to suppress the knowledge and expreience, education of the citizens of those country.
Vietnam is such a country and I recall they wanted into WIPO or WTO... but were told that they needed to reduce software piracy before they would even be considered for entrance. How they respoded was to pass some laws or policies that all system sold in teh country were to have FOSS pre-installed.
With such FOSS there is also more inherent respect for the license....
What connection does BSA have to FOSS???
Piracy is "Free trail without the BS."
Anyone want to reply to this post with an approximate count of the justifications for using software that wasn't paid for?
How many were weak variations on 'I wouldn't have paid for it anyway, so they lose nothing?' chestnut?
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Maybe I should have posted this higher on the tree but it seems pertinent here.
All I see is constant bickering about "the price of MS products" or other companies products people seem to like to use.
Having been on the development side of software and now the business end, I see there are a few points being overlooked here.
1) Piracy rarely takes away profit from the company. I don't have any hard figures in front of me but the last time we did a market study it was somewhere in the range of 28% of people that bought our software actually originally used it via a pirated copy. That means that over a quarter of the people that stole our software ended up buying it because they liked the way it worked. as for the rest of the people that stole our software - they wouldn't have bought it anyhow. We actually profit from piracy as opposed to losing money. We wouldn't have sold those copies in the first place.
2) A lot of people need to understand that there is a lot of cost involved in development of large software packages like Visual Studio. We have to license other tools that we use in our products (No, I didn't admit to working for MS - just making an example). That costs money to license those products. Then there is the Research side of software. We conduct market surveys. That costs time and money. Then there is development. That is the biggest factor outside of advertising (which is another big issue which needs it's own topic).
3) I see a lot of complaining about the price of Visual Studio in this thread. Visual Studio is expensive but it also is not intended for the Home User. It is intended for Development in an environment that is a bit larger than "Johnny Freeware Developer's" basement. And yet, there are home use versions for most software packages like VS
4) If you don't like the price, don't buy it. You really have no right to tell someone how much they may charge for their product. They own it. If you want to "teach them a lesson" just don't buy their product and they may end up pricing themselves out of the market.
5) Don't try to proclaim innocence by reasoning that you just "steal it to test it then go out and buy it". As our market studies have shown, only 28% of users do that. That means that 72% of you claiming to be "honest try and buy users" are both liars and thieves. Don't tell us how you "redeem yourself". Redemption is a personal issue.
Finally (that would be 6), I see a lot of claims that people will just use Open Source products in place of expensive commercial products. Lies. Most people will continue stealing it. Open Source is limited not by it's user base but rather, the number of people using it that will actually contribute worthwhile code to the project. Again, as with the pirates, the majority of people using open source are just using it because they don't want to pay for a product and the majority of those people aren't contributing, they are leeching. (Let's not get on me about this point - I know there are many great Open Source products and a lot of people that contribute to them. I am just pointing out that the majority of users have nothing to offer back to it)
My intention wasn't start a flamewar but I do see it coming.
* Si hoc legere scis numium eruditionis habes *
Rememeber that North Vietnam starves while Kim Jong Il flies private chefs around the world to find the fanciest cuisine for his finnicky, dicatator-tastes. Most poverty in this world is artificial - remove the dictators plundering the country, and whadda'ya know, it's a moot point.
DATABASE WOW WOW
There was a time, 20 years ago, when all software, including business software, was copy protected. It caused businesses no end of headaches. So the software industry, except for games, switched to no copy protection, and simultaneously the BSA took out full page magazine ads that said "don't copy that floppy" and warned of hundred thousand dollar fines.
That's why to this day you can copy the media of just about any software without worrying about things like funky formatted sectors.
Too bad the BSA is going the way of the RIAA. I was hoping it would go the other way around, that the RIAA would take a cue from the old BSA and abandom DRM and launch a campaign to make copying copyrighted music a social stigma.
As much as I hate the strong-arm tactics of the MPAA, RIAA, etc., I think they are probably right. Piracy does mostly affect the bottom line for developed countries.
Why? Because software and other similiar "intellectual" property is the last product developed nations have to sell. All of the "non-intellectual work" has been sent to other countries. If intellectual work has no value, because no one is willing to pay for it (it is easier to obtain it for free), they (we) are screwed.
I agree with others who say that the vast majority of "pirated" things would not have been purchased anyway if they could not have been obtained illegally. But there is some percentage that would have been. How many more jobs could have been created at Microsoft if 3% of all pirated copies of Office had been purchased legally?
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
After the first 10%, I imagine the rest is downhill.
I bet that's why they quoted the 10% figure... they probably know that a significan tportion of those people (the other 25%) are not going to purchase the software any which way.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The study concluded that countries with high software piracy rates have more to gain economically by protecting intellectual property rights.
"The study even claims potential global gains of '2.4 million new jobs..."
Yeah, and 2.3 million of these new jobs will be for lawyers.
The theory that we've all been taught is that copyrights are "intellectual property" [1] rights that protect creators, and give them an incentive to make creative works that provide personal and public benefit. The truth is that property rights exist to allocate finite resources, not to artificially choke supply for the sake of incentive. Rather than protection, or a free market property, copyrights are more like a regulation that micromanages how people can use information. In practice, they are dangerous to rely on and lock out more opportunity then they promote.
History has shown that just protection of property rights leads to strong incentives, but coercion of incentive does not necessarily lead to just property rights. Simply because an institution calls something a property right, doesn't mean that it is. If, for example, an industry used the government to artificially restrict the natural supply of food and called shares of that monopoly a "property right", it would be very easy to see how the artificial distortion of markets would not only cause opportunity loss, but harm to society. Copyrights are a way for some industries to use government to artificially restrict the natural supply of information and force the market to center around information control rather than service value. That causes opportunity loss, harm to society, and a burden of enforcement that is too heavy to bear in the information age.
Normally copyright concerns would not be so eminent as they have been effectively used for hundreds of years without failure. However, things are different this time and faith in the copyright system is rather dangerous. Just as the industrial revolution forced the commoditisation of the labor market and the ugly death of the plantation system. The information age is forcing the commoditisation of information and the ugly death of the copyright system. It is not a coincidence that the speculative stock market crash around 1857, regarding industrial technology is very similar to the speculative stock market crash in 2001 regarding information technology. It is not a coincidence that the slavery issue created a raging debate about artificial "property rights" as copyrights have today. It is not a coincidence the disproportional prosperity of the plantation system then and the disproportional prosperity of the copyright industries today (That is, unless one thinks hollywood is underpaid). Things like the harsh punishments for merely teaching a person of color to read, vs copyright crimes having punishments worse than rape today. These are all symptoms of drastically changing markets and entrenched dying industries trying to prevent change. As for those industries that thought that the entire purpose and meaning of the industrial revolution was to leverage inventions like the cotton-gin to expand their plantations for unlimited growth and profit - they were deadly wrong in spite of all the money and intellect behind them. Those industries today whom believe that the entire purpose and meaning of the information age is to leverage inventions like the Internet to expand the influence of copyright controls for vast growth and profit, well?
Well, over the next several years, the copyright system will not only be changed, it will become effectively dead. All industries that center on them will change or die a protracted death, and all institutions that rely on a proprietary information infrastructure will be stuck in the mud as they suffer numerous opportunity costs. The information age is doing for information services what the industrial revolution did for production. However, the copyright system doesn't center around the supply and demand of service, but an artificial supply restrictions on information that services bring about. Over the coming years as information becomes commoditized and service value becomes more important than the content value, there will be trillions of dollars worth of pressure to kill the copyright system. In fact, it's already starting. Publis
... As more and more software is released open source, and companies make money on consulting and services instead of plastic disks.
It's inevitable. You can't compete with "Free".
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
You can in certain fields. Though for the typical software windows idiots buy [e.g. text editors, IM clients, media players, etc] no.
But I would pay money for optizing compilers. As a matter of my profession having access to those tools is beneficial. GCC is great but ICC can smoke it in some circumstances [for instance]. I imagine studios would pay money for art tools [e.g. photoshop] over the free Gimp, etc.
Though yeah you're right in general most software that traditionally sold for money in the last decade is now being replaced by stuff in the OSS world. If people stopped clutching to old world business models we wouldn't need "anti-piracy" task forces.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
atrategy for battling Open Source.
A few years back, I decided to abandon all software I was not either entitled to use (open source, freeware, paid licenses, etc...) and could not afford to own.
For a while It was a real bitch, but then things changed. While I've been a Linux user since the mid 90's, I really didn't fully explore OSS until about 2000. What I found was that a lot of software is simply not necessary. Using the software I had in more creative ways, or simply learning (again) to work without some software has had clear benefits to me, both in terms of dollars saved and in terms of just being able to work in the first place.
Today, I own a coupla pieces of commercial software and the rest is all OSS. That more than piracy is resulting in lost sales. If they really succeed in cutting down on piracy, the OSS side of things is just going to get a lot worse for them and they know it.
The only solid way to keep the proprietary, "pay as often as we can get you to pay to compute" model sustainable is to change the rules of the game such that OSS alternatives are driven back underground. This continues to happen where multi-media applications are concerned, but that's not enough. Getting Ogle from another country really does not affect anyone as the DVD player devices are all bundled with some goofy player anyway.
Getting OpenOffice, GIMP, web browsers, development tools, etc... back out of the mainstream will make a big difference. I suspect the approach will be to slowly move legislative opinion in this direction, then deal with citizen complaints through "access programs" very similar in nature to what the big phama companies do today.
Can't afford that lifesaving drug? Simple, if you beg and prove you really, really are gonna die without their property, they will "give" it to you rather than do the right thing.
Software companies are going to end up trying the same things, IMHO.
I regularly write my elected representatives about OSS issues. I let them know I write OSS software and why and what value the growing body of OSS software brings to anyone willing to participate. Participation can be as simple as just using the software of your choice or as involved as developing, training, distributing, etc... We all benefit.
Oh, the one biggie I always mention is the fact that OSS is unique in that value received is more than value contributed for everyone involved because no material goods are required to make use of the combined result. This is important because many industry (closed industry) lobbiests equate this value proposition as an "unsustainable ponzi type scheme" that does more harm than good as it takes advantage of contributors without "closing the value chain". Translation: We can't compete with free and the world (read government) needs us here.
Back on topic: The IP battle is imporant here in the US because we have outsourced darn near everything else, yet we still consume an awful lot per capita. Unless the world can be convinced that IP is viable, we are going to become increasingly hard pressed to restore that balance in the coming years.
On one hand, I'm not looking forward to us having to figure that out. And IP is an easy out. On the other, I sure don't want OSS going anywhere because it's primary value to me is not the cost savings, but the near total computing freedom that comes along for the ride.
One of my favorite computers happens to be an older SGI computer. OSS keeps that machine viable. Any of us, who know what we are doing, can take pretty much any combination of computing hardware we can get our hands on and be productive with it. As time goes on, I find this to be quite compelling in that I can continue to compute just the way I want to, not how I am told.
IP takes all of that away and I KNOW that's a bad thing, simply because being left with no alternatives means near total control of our computing environment. History has shown time and time again that scenario never is
Blogging because I can...
You know what else would create more jobs and thus help the economy? Ban machines that twist rope together. Now it has to be done by hand, so voila! More jobs! The point? Just because something creates more jobs doesn't mean it's good. That sort of logic had the loom banned in England shortly after it was invented to protect jobs.
While it's true that eliminating the flow of free (pirated) software into those countries would probably create the possibility of jobs in those countries, many of those jobs would duplicate work already done somewhere else to produce similar software. On the other hand, free and cheap resources are also known to boost economies and keep them going strong (we all know how much the US economy would suffer if the price of gasoline doubled), so eliminating that cheap/free resource of pirated software would have some harmful effects too, even aside from my earlier esoteric argument. I'm sure eliminating software piracy in those countries would also result in a lot more money going to US and other foreign software companies, which becomes a drain on that economy... So I don't know that I believe it would help anywhere near as much as the BSA claims (not that they have any reason to be realistically conservative, of course).
"If you give in and help support our crusade to concentrate wealth, we'll cut you in for a small share of it."
A massive base of hard working people can give substantial amounts of money towards software. They will be taxed. The tax money can go towards the Iraq War. Woo Hoo!!
It will surely lead to a few more features in MS Word.
This is absolutely great.
Stop invalid scientific research. Ask your local scientists to feed their lab rats with a phytoestrogen-free chow.
The countries with the highest rates of 'piracy', and the weakest protection of 'intellectual property' also happen to be the counties with the highest economic growth. Same old lies from greedy big business.
I often think it's interesting the way people value different products differently, even when both products are simply entertainment. You don't think a game that costs $55 for 8 hours' worth of play is worthwhile. I might tend to agree -- I don't generally play videogames at all -- but then, in the grand scheme of things that sounds like a pretty market-standard rate of return on entertainment dollars spent. Here in San Francisco a movie might cost you $10.50, for a total play lenth of about an hour and a half.
... and yet I'm willing to bet you generally wait for the paperback.
8 hours / 1.5 hours per movie * $10.50 ticket price = $56, total
On the other hand, a hardcover novel might take you considerably longer than 8 hours to finish with a cover price of maybe $28
Breakfast served all day!
...this time, is the fact that the BSA is distributing this BS (coincidence?) worldwide at the same time. The usual suspects (politicians, etc.) try to fall for it in a believable manner (you have to agree with statements of people who are actually paying you money to do so), and will try to enact the more severe punishments their real employers are demanding (to put it bluntly: politicians living on taxes are so 90s, getting paid for "consulting" in the industry is hip).
What's new?
A program is just an series of calculations, a very complex kind of equation. A compiler is a series of equations which could produce (among other things) a word processor. A word processor itself is a series of equations, which can with the right input, produce documents.
Software will always be copied. It's not theft. It's not piracy. It's "copyright violation", which your country may or may not have laws for.
I highly encourage it. Why should I have to pay for something I can't afford when it can be copied?
What job do you have? I make shit for money and my prospects aren't looking to improve soon. Companies
spend millions on advertising and piracy is common, even sometimes allowed in order to increase market share (office, windows, adobe).
So piracy is ok when it fits a corporate model and illegal and immoral when it doesn't? Give me a break the corporations are fucking all of us over.
Why do you think gangsta rap is so popular. It's about have and have nots. No amount of moralistic legalistic bullshitting
will change that. Of course the well-off and privileged can't understand it. But the majority of us can.
Why can't a poor person in China, or anywhere have an equal right to own any piece of software produced? Especially if that is creative software. The answer is: if they can, they will and you can't do shit about it. The US is basically enforcing economic imperialism on the rest of the world through patents and IP.
I hope someone steals your tv, they would be doing you a favor.
fuckers.
Hmm... let's see, before Windows XP, it was fairly simple to pirate a Windows OS and put it on many machines - did M$ go broke? No their sales soared.
During that same period of time (Win 3.x - Win 2k), didn't the proliferation of the PC worldwide also explode?
What about Doom?, how many pirated copies of that do you think there were? And yet ID software thrived and in fact gaming software as a whole became a highly lucrative industry that did not even exist before the wide proliferation of the software.
What was the piracy stratagy back then?
It seems to me that history proves that software piracy actually was a benefit to the major software houses and even created industry.
You can argue moral/ethical/legal debates all you want but the truth is that the software industry wants a perfect world. This is not only unrealistic - it would probably be a case of "be careful what you wish for" i.e.: a disaster.
Same thing with the music industry, they want every last penny that they legally have coming to them. That's fine in theory and in a perfect world, but it simply ignores reality.
If you ignore reality, generally, you are labeled "insane". And rightly so.
Yes, the error you spotted was indeed a third error - a transitional fossil from when I realised that maybe CD prices had gone down since I bought my last non-magnatune.com* one For the record, the other two that I noticed were: 1) the assumption that "ethical" downloaders would download as many albums per capita as unethical downloaders. If this is not the case it throws the 5 percents off slightly. 2) the assumption that "ethical" labels would charge as much as unethical labels. If this is not the case, the 1500% is probably wrong. * Yes I am mentioning these guys a lot. No I'm not an astroturfer, I just like their motto.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
>The study concluded that countries with high software piracy rates have more to gain economically by protecting intellectual property rights. (...) Thats funny. They keep on trying to delude :)
(You take the more serious affected, and you work a study around those cases that shows how much benefit it would be to ... blah)
{Same for the RIAA... DVD Sales worldwide are climbing very good, DESPITE the lack of a considerable number of good movies and DESPITE that apparent P2P piracy - but those facts wouldnt keep any spokesman or lawyeller from argueing}
Another piece of software that probably won't go open-source or out of business is Oracle. It's just head and shoulders above the rest of the field, I can't see it going anywhere. But that's server-side, and I was mostly concerned with client-side. ;)
Good point on the compilers.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
I wish I knew what you were talking about.