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Companies Coming Around To Piracy's Upside?
traycerb writes "The Economist has an article detailing how numerous companies are finding piracy's silver lining: 'Statistics about the traffic on file-sharing networks can be useful. They can reveal, for example, the countries where a new singer is most popular, even before his album has been released there. Having initially been reluctant to be seen exploiting this information, record companies are now making use of it. This month BigChampagne, the main music-data analyser, is extending its monitoring service to pirated video, too.' The kicker is Microsoft's tacit endorsement of Windows piracy in developing markets, namely China. The big man himself, Bill Gates, says it best in an interview with Fortune last year: 'It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not.'"
I hope you do not mind once people's definition of what is ok and whats not starts clashing with yours? Exploiting for gain, hmm? You don't happen to have a daughter now, do you?
Though I'll give you a point: at least you're honest, you are exploiting people for your own gain. Thats better than most pirates. My gripe is with people who do exactly like you, but lie to themselves to make themselve feel pristine pure.
Just a question for any software developers out there - does your pay go down when people use the software you develop without paying for it? Are your developer friends forced out of work? Do the companies you work for go out of business? Can you say for certain that the people "stealing" your software would have bought it anyway? If you answered NO to these four questions, then where is the problem? You get paid, your company does, everyone stays in work, and many people who couldn't afford the software (and sometimes it is well out of the price range of people who earn $200-$300 a week - ableton live for instance costs about $650)get to try it out. As those people get richer, they are 0.25% more likely to buy the software for every 1% increase in wealth, so by letting people - who would normally just overlook the software as a luxury - use it, you have more probability they will buy yours in the future. oh... and a study has found no correlation between music piracy and a drop in sales. This is one of several to do so. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070212-8813.html