Slashdot Mirror
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 keep telling people that when they pirate Windows or Office they're not taking a poke at Microsoft, they're taking a poke at potential competitors for Microsoft. This isn't news, this is not something Bill Gates just realized, Microsoft USED this when Office was getting established, in all kinds of ways, even allowing business users to use the same licensed software at home, rather than using something else because they couldn't get a second license through their office.
This is the reason that Slashdotters who support Linux shouldn't be fixing every Windows PC around and giving others pirated software. So many people think they're sticking it to the man by using pirated proprietary software, but it only increases the user base of it.
Microsoft is happy to let the Chinese pirate everything, because it locks them in and increases their user base. Without it, alternatives like Red Flag Linux might actually have a few users.
Systemd: the PulseAudio of init systems
That article reads like a young adult suddenly realizing how the world really works, but still stuck in the idea that everything they learned before must still be true.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Because software isn't food or clothing. You're not entitled to it. If you can't afford it, use a free alternative, or nothing at all. You'll still be alive tomorrow even if you don't get to use the latest and greatest software.
So let me reverse the question with the above: Why is it that you feel people are entitled to luxury?
Why is it that you feel people are entitled to luxury?
GREATEST! COUNTRY! ON! EARTH!
EVAR !!!
To put it plainly: go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut*.
I, personally, pay for all the software I use, music I listen to, and movies I watch; despite the fact that I have the technical chops to crack whatever I'd want.
Also, in the interest of full disclosure, I make my money in software; and, by extension, "IP". Ergo, I want to be paid for my work and I think others should be too.
However.
And, that's a big "HOWEVER", I do not accept the rhetoric, propaganda, and evil litigiousness of the software lobby. The idea that everyone who illegally uses a copy of some software product is either: a danger to society, an irretrievable thief, a tax cheat, or a supporter of terrorism is obscene.
The most disgusting part of this, to get back to the point of my original point, is that all the aspersions cast upon those who engage in such piracy notwithstanding, they still wouldn't have paid for "it" anyway.
So, in the end, draconian laws and mindsets are being fostered for no morally, or fiscally, sound reason.
*Thanks to Kurt Vonnegut for that vignette.
Nine Inch Nails gave out their new album (The Slip) for free and used the geographic data from the torrent downloads to plan their tour schedule.
I totally agree. The problem starts with non-corporate software. Devil May Cry 4 just came out for PC a few weeks ago. I don't foresee many corporations buying it... so what exactly do you do? The answer to this so far has either been: A) put some fucking annoying and useless DRM on it, or B) make games that require a corporate server that isn't being distributed to run (WoW).
So now what do you do? Not very many people will lend their time to make something like that...coding a PC game sucks. The drivers are buggy as hell, there's tons of them, you have to support the lowest common denominator, then there's customer support, etc... so while free software isn't completly out, it will be rare in that field. So exactly what is the solution? These things cost millions to develop, and as technology to push games further comes along, it will take more and more artists to make the graphics and sounds in the game, the voice actors, etc.
I also know a LOT of people who pirate photoshop and do a heck of a lot more than just "messing around", and will openly say that its a critical piece of software for them (its a hobby for them...but hey, sports are hobbys too, and the gears are expensive -too-). So what do you do about those?
The home edition is a good idea and it does work (I've witnessed a lot of people buying Office Home and Student... 150$ for 3 licenses, thats not bad at all), but when people start feeling entitled to the top edition, or we're talking about single player games... I don't see an easy solution.
You're right that software isn't food or clothing. It isn't tangible. Thus, whoever created the software must have known that their efforts were going toward creation of a product that can not be bought or sold in the same manner that bread and milk are. With tangible goods, either one has or one does not have the item. With intangible products like software, music, or movies, the question of whether or not one has the item is ambiguous. I think the real problem here is that the global economy is based on the construct that all products bought and sold are tangible. The industrial revolution brought us the ability to make the same thing many times, with a lower unit cost due to volume discount. The concept of mass production is meaningless when the cost of replicating a product is zero. The internet eliminates the distribution cost and allows every consumer to become a reseller in a zero-cost market.
As a software engineer myself, I have come to realize one simple fact about the 21st century global market. I do not and can not sell the product of my efforts. I sell my effort itself. I provide a service for a fee. Eventually, most of the software people need will have already been created, and with any luck the software will be organized and self-governed by open source communities. The people in these communities will not be paid by the users of the software through some sort of licensing system. They will be paid by the companies who produce tangible goods that can be sold in the marketplace, companies who derive benefit from integrating the software into their business model. The software itself will be free. The value provided to these companies by the software engineers will be the integration and application of the software to improve revenue generation of some tangible product.