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id CEO Claims PC Hardware Manufacturers Love Piracy

Posted by Soulskill on from the arrrrdware dept.

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."

10 of 676 comments (clear)

  1. What a secret! by MahJongKong · · Score: 5, Interesting

    That's business as usual, not a "dirty little secret".

    1. Re:What a secret! by hedwards · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Precisely, that's been the case for decades. Back 20 years ago, it was pretty much assumed that when you got a computer people would come over with disks of commercial software that would be installed.

      It makes it hard for me to take piracy complaints seriously since, the actual rates are probably only a fraction of what they used to be. Sure that means more piracy in terms of numbers, but a much smaller amount in terms of actual percentage of users.

    2. Re:What a secret! by PC+and+Sony+Fanboy · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Exactly. Years ago, when I lived at home, if I bought a computer and it didn't come with software, it was unheard of...

      These days, if my parents buy a computer from anywhere that isn't a big box store, they expect it to come pre-loaded with software - even though they havn't paid for it. Otherwise, the computer doesn't "work", and they've asked them to fix it. That is the price for their customer loyalty (and money).

      If I buy a computer with no software, it isn't a problem. I'm plenty capable of installing thousands of dollars of pirated software on it - by my self.

    3. Re:What a secret! by Bert64 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      PC games were pirated too, just as much if not more than Amiga games...
      There were still plenty of games coming out, they just weren't as good as other platforms any more... The other platforms had caught up and surpassed the Amiga. Piracy had very little to do with it, although the rampant anti-piracy brigade did a lot to drive what few Amiga users had internet access away from the platform....

      Pay for a TCP stack...
      Pay for a (pretty crap) telnet client...
      Pay for a (massively inferior to other platforms) web browser...
      Pay for an IRC client

      I mean come on, what other platform did quite so much to discourage uptake of the internet? And if you did pirate any of those apps, you could expect to be shunned from any amiga related forums.
      The IRC client especially had a backdoor allowing people to see if it was pirated or not, if you went on irc to an amiga related channel with a pirated client you would get banned.

      I recently tried setting up an old amiga i had in my loft, i was unable to acquire any of the software aside from demo versions... Even if i was willing to pay for it, none of the sites which sold it are still up, the only versions available are crippleware which crash out after 30 minutes.

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  2. Confused CEO by EmperorKagato · · Score: 4, Interesting

    When was the last time your company released quality software?

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    ----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
  3. Numbers and Guilt by Sniper511 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  4. Screw the Other Guy and Pass the Savings on... by Bieeanda · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Why should they care? If a dedicated gamer pirates $200 worth of FPS games, that's $200 that they can put toward buying the latest video card instead.

    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.

  5. Re:Simplest solution to stopping "piracy" by Gavagai80 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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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  6. Lame logic by hackingbear · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Lame logic:
    • Traditional software is a product, not a service. (In the new software-as-service model, it is subscription which you pay continuously as you use.) You are like asking Toyota to release all its design and manufacturing process of Camry to public domain after 5 years of selling that model, or even asking them to allow anyone go into the production plant and make a car for himself, freely.
    • Once you acquired a software product, nobody asks you to buy new upgrade versions. It is the consumer who wants the latest and greatest. You are like asking the car maker to send you a new car each model year after you buy one at particular year.

    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.

  7. Re:For hard drives, this is probably true by GaryPatterson · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.