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Google Adds Licensing Server DRM To Android Market
eldavojohn writes "According to AfterDawn, Google has given app makers the option to use a license server as DRM to ensure the user has paid for an app before they can download it. Reportedly, the Market app will communicate with a Google license server using RSA encryption. It is important to note this is only available for non-free apps (built with SDK 1.5 and later), and it was instituted to provide a better solution to the old and widely criticized copy protection scheme that was susceptible to Android app piracy (like sideloading). For better or for worse, Android's Marketplace appears to now have an optional, phone-home form of DRM."
Following news of the new licensing service, Hexage Ltd, makers of a popular Android game called Radiant, released the data they had collected on piracy of Radiant over a 10-month period beginning last October. A series of charts shows total users, paid users and the piracy rate, by region.
I don't fault Google for adding this in. They are trying to build up Android and one part of doing that is by developing a strong development ecosystem around it. The problem is if there is huge piracy numbers it's hard to get money behind developing an app for Android. By giving some businesses a little more comfort, they can help to encourage adoption of the platform as a viable development platform for a business.
At the great risk to my karma, I guess I have to just pipe up and say that I don't see the problem here.
License-server based apps have been selling on various platforms for years. Decades. Android now supports this, adding a little attraction to developers to invest time and money making an application for use on Android. Given the lack of QA on a great many Android apps (can anyone offer an explanation how Facebook for Android is such pure garbage, all jokes about content aside?) I for one see this as a step in the right direction.
Android developers, you now have a piracy deterrent for your applications you would like monetary compensation for creating, and more importantly, maintaining. I fail to see how this is evil and how any of the wry 'do-no-evil-lol' quips are deserved.
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
Also, a lot of people disagree with paying for apps as that goes against the purpose and concept of free software
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
Palm trees and 8
You can see in the charts something like 98% piracy in South America.
This happens because... there's no way to buy applications if you're in South America. So, anyone with a paid application here *has* to pirate it.
Also, a lot of people disagree with paying for apps as that goes against the purpose and concept of free software (and associated benefits/gains).
I can't believe people still confuse free as in beer and free as in freedom, despite how many times people point out the difference on here.
Free software types are not opposed to for-pay software, at all. The two concepts are not related.
The potential evil is one of deceit, it's in colluding with someone who claims to be 'selling' an application, which in reality is programmed to disobey the person deceived into thinking they own it if it can't find this DRM server.
Using DRM, by itself, is not an issue. It's this refusal to be clear that, by doing so, you've changed 'selling' into a strange form of rental (with incompletely specified conditions) which is the evil bit. If you participate in an activity which looks like selling, but doesn't actually give the 'buyer' the freedoms they get when they buy a useful object normally, that looks like complicity in fraud to me.
Lots of others may be doing it, but in morality this is no excuse.