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id CEO Claims PC Hardware Manufacturers Love Piracy
arcticstoat sends a link to an interview with the CEO of id Software, Todd Hollenshead, in which he suggests that hardware manufacturers count on piracy to help drive profits, rather than doing something to prevent it. Quoting:
"...I think that there's been this dirty little secret among hardware manufacturers, which is that the perception of free content — even if you're supposed to pay for it on PCs — is some sort hidden benefit that you get when you buy a PC, like a right to download music for free or a right to download pirated movies and games. ...And I think that just based on their actions...what they say is one thing, but what they do is another. When it comes into debates about whether peer-to-peer file-sharing networks that by-and-large have the vast majority, I'm talking 99 per cent of the content is illicitly trading copyrighted property, they'll come out on the side of the 1 per cent of the user doing it for legitimate benefit."
That's business as usual, not a "dirty little secret".
When was the last time your company released quality software?
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
If the claim in TFA were true, wouldn't we see lots of manufacturers pushing Linux? If they see pirated software as having a significant effect on demand for their product, they should see free software as having the same effect?
I suspect that they are just indifferent.
The simpler explanation is that the hardware manufacturers don't want to increase the complexity and cost of their product in such a way that would decrease their product's usability and their customer's satisfaction with the product. Crippled hardware and unhappy customers would likely lead to lower market share, which would equal lower profits. And the hardware manufacturers are in business to make money, not to protect the failures of other company's business models.
1) I would LOVE to see where he's getting that "99% of peer-to-peer is piracy" number. Sounds like something he came up with off the top of his head that we're just supposed to accept as common knowledge.
2) Even if that were true (and I doubt it... I'll give him that most peer-to-peer is probably illegal, but 99%...? Really?), is it still fair to punish the 1% of us that use Bittorrent for Linux ISO's, free software, or the odd WoW patch?
3) Even if ISPs did do away with / block bittorrent or other P2P traffic, you really think the geek thinktank that is the Internet wouldn't come up with something else? Hell, you really want to stop piracy, we oughtta do away with this "Interweb" thingy!
Give it up, gang. No matter what you do, somebody's gonna find a way to steal your crap. Deal with it, and move on. Quit punishing the rest of us for it.
And again, why should they care? Piracy is not their problem, and it's not worth their R&D time to bolt 'trusted computing' modules onto their products. Suggesting that they have an obligation to act is like suggesting that firearm manufacturers have an obligation to prevent gun-related crimes.
Speaking as someone who makes a living from my copyrighted software, I agree that it's different from physical property and I'd like to see a 5 year copyright term on software (20 years might be more appropriate for other media). I've public-domained my five year old stuff anyway.
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U.S. law is based on the fact that it is better that ten guilty men go free than one goe to jail for a crime that he didn't commit. Clearly, the government loves murderers!
(caveat: in theory; in practice District Attorneys, and other prosecutors, are more than happy to convict people of crimes they know damn well the defendant didn't commit to further their own agenda(s). In theory, theory always works. In practice it often doesn't.)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
When Doom 2, and Quake was released John Carmach was happy that everyone was pirating the game. He felt joy in the fact that EVERYONE wanted to play HIS game. Not to mention the mad cash that they made after the fact. A lot of people would pay after trying it out. Not to mention some chip manufactures might have tried to include some form of DRM. I think that utimatly if that happened every one would just simply move to something else.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
The only real difference between a software product and a hardware product like a car is that the "manufacturing plant" for software product usually costs about $1000 operable by a single person, whereas the one for car costs $1,000,000,000 and must be operated by a team of people.
I'm always amused by the level of altruism of people in the software field -- to the point of idiotic -- no professionals in other fields are so eager to eliminate their competitive barriers.
My wife and I, when we combined our CD collection, realised that we had over 300 CDs, with only a handful of duplicates. Our DVD collection is perhaps only 100 or so.
We easily have > 500GB (depending on encoding quality) of media, and I can point to physical discs we've encoded from.
Now maybe it did cost $6000, although I'd say it was far less, but over 20 years of collecting music and stuff, I'd be surprised if by age 35 anyone buying an iPod could *not* fill it with their own stuff. Before we combined I had 30GB of music from my CD collection.
Don't buy into Steve Ballmer's line about iPods being full of pirated material.