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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.'"
Yeah, even the fact that Gates said it in an interview is (10 year) old news:
"Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software," he said. "Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."
They still do this through the Home Use Program which is so cheap it may as well be free. I got a legitimate copy of Office Enterprise 2007 under this for £17.99 including P&P.