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%."

Comments

Re:If it wasnt for piracy

[CastrTroy]

This is very true. I wonder how quick free/Open Source software would take off if suddenly, all the expensive commercial software was impossible to pirate, or if they just made it too risky to bother pirating. Most people wouldn't choose MS Office over OO.o, if they were forced to fork over the $500. Same thing goes for photoshop, visual studio, and all that other high priced software with cheap/free alternatives.

Re:hmm

[zerocool^]

It's getting to the point now in my life where I'm financially stable and can afford to buy the odd game. But, even as such, I usually try before I buy, and that means piracy. For example: I just played through F.E.A.R. It took me about 8 hours to beat it. And, upon starting up again, I've realized that it has no replay value whatsoever. $55 for 8 hours? Thanks, but no; I'm glad I didn't buy it. It's uninstalled. On the other hand, Age of Empires III I downloaded, played, and liked; and I'm going to go buy it.

I origionally pirated my copy of Neverwinter Nights; but because I enjoyed it so much, I ended up buying the retail version, both expansion packs, and paying for all the downloadable premium modules. And I'm talking as they became available; not years later in the ultra-mega-pack for $40. I probably have close to $180 invested in Neverwinter Nights.

Every time I feel guilty about this policy, I end up buying a game and being pissed off about it. The latest example was Doom III - I bought it, and played it, and it too has lackluster multiplayer and no replay value.

It basically boils down to if you make good games, I'll buy. But, if you put out crap, I won't.

However, it should be noted that this only goes for 1.) Games and 2.) MS Office. Now that I work for tech support in the CS department of a university, I have access to the MSDN Academic Alliance copy of Office, so that's now legal, but I used to pirate it. However, I also used to feel bad about it; since I knew that the only reason I was pirating it was because I needed to be able to create word documents for specific purposes (resume comes to mind), and it's what everyone else uses; I'd have been technologically happy with Open Office. But it's to the point where I've found free programs to replace all the little things I used to pirate.

For example; CuteFTP - now I use FileZilla. Eudora - now Thunderbird. Nero - now I use burnatonce; though I'm still looking for a free (beer; possibly speech too) CD Burner that doesn't suck - burn at once burns images, and does it well, but doesn't do anything else. Photoshop - Gimp. Norton Corporate AV - now AVG Free. I don't even remember what I used before Exact Audio Copy. And I want to know where VLC has been my whole life.

I've also stopped downloading TV programs and Movies. Movies basically because I never go to the movies anyway (baby) and anything that's good, I'll buy when it's on DVD (I'd rather sit at home comfortable and be able to pause). TV - now that I have Tivo, I don't miss anything; and I've sort of gotten over the need to archive everything; but should I want to archive, I can always use TiVo desktop, a program to strip the DRM from the files, and re-encode the MPEG2.

So, basically, I'm pretty much proof of "if it's reasonably priced, I'd just as soon buy it". I'm also proof of "If you put out crap, and claim that piracy is hurting your sales, you're wrong: it's either too expensive, or it just sucks".

~W

Re:Software Piracy Rate?

[grcumb]

"Basicly piracy is the last thing that keeps Free Software from world domination."

And that is precisely why I oppose software 'piracy'. I live in a country where I can buy any software I want for less than 20 bucks at the local CD store. The parliament here has yet to ratify the Berne Conventions on copyright, so we exist in a sort of a grey zone. There's no legal reason to respect software EULAs.

But the use of proprietary software has created many other difficulties, not the least of which is a cargo-cult mentality. Software is not something that one configures or, heaven forfend, writes; it's something you go down to the store to buy. If something goes wrong with it, you just buy something better. If there's nothing there that does what you want... well then, software can't do that.

That's all well and good as far as it goes, but it does absolutely nothing to develop the local economy, improve educational opportunities, or to impress on people just what kind of amazing things they could be doing with software in this country. This place is poor in resources, but doesn't lack for smart people. The only way people here will ever find really well-paid work is to sell their skills overseas, and the only way they can do that is to leverage the Internet, and the only way they can do that is if they understand the software, and the only way they can do that is if they wean themselves from the proprietary tit.

Free Software costs time and effort, and will always be more expensive (though ultimately more valuable) than pirated software.