Posted by
CmdrTaco
on from the but-none-of-mine dept.
Billy_Ray writes "A study came out that states that 2/5 of all installed software is pirated. Check it out:
The Story "
Since the loki guys gave me a copy of Civ CTP, I no longer
have any pirated software on my box. So I'm in the majority.
Yippee.
Article neglects legality of piracy where surveyed
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 3
Vietnam? Singapore? China? Taiwan? Um, isn't western style IP law absent in those nations. Ever heard of a big company called Son May Records in Taiwan? They COPY CDs, movies, and software and sell the copies for cheap. They are a legal business locally (not kids in a basement). They follow local laws. Their company is licensed, pays taxes, and is regulated like any other business. In short, they are not criminals. How arrogant it is for someone in another nation to decree, based on their own local laws, to decree the foreign legal entity to be "criminal". Get a clue! The world is a big place and *your* rules and *your* morality simply do not operate everywhere. And both you and they are "right" simultaneously. Just accept it.
The mathematics of "piracy"
by
Phil+Gregory
·
· Score: 4
Say a company is selling a software program. They calculate that a reasonable price for the program, based on the expenses incurrend and potential market, is about $40. Then, they look at this study. If only two out of every five people will use theur software, they'll need to charge more to recoup their losses. To make the same amount of money, they'll need to charge $100 per copy. (Assuming that the higher price doesn't chase off more people.) Then, they can point back to that 2/5 study and claim that they're losing 3/5 of their possible income, or $300 for every five people using their software!
Maybe no one's that drastic, but the claim that "piracy makes software prices higher" should immediately indicate that multiplying "pirated" copies by product cost is nowhere near an accurate calculation for "losses". Throw, ans many other comments have, in the fact that many "piraters" wouldn't buy to full version anyway, and you have virtually meaningless numbers.
--Phil (I once illicitly copied software. The world of Free Software has shown me another way.)
-- 355/113 -- Not the famous irrational number PI, but an incredible simulation!
Several Bootlegging Issues
by
Frater+219
·
· Score: 3
(Please note the subject line. "Piracy" is a bad metaphor for software copyright and license violation, because it refers to violent crime on the high seas. "Bootlegging", which refers to trafficking in contraband [specifically, alcohol during Prohibition] is a better, if less commonly used, metaphor for the activity.)
Bootlegging spreads bad software. It's true that Microsoft encourages, or at least tolerates, bootlegging in order to gain mindshare and installed base. Every system running MS-Windows, and every system running MS-Office, is a gain for Microsoft. It's a bigger gain if it's paid for, but even if it isn't, it increases the general atmosphere of lock-in.
Those who believe that it's ethically okay to bootleg software one wouldn't buy should take this to heart. When a friend emails you an MS-Word document and you haven't licensed Word, you have a choice: You can bootleg Word, or you can ask your friend to send you the document in an open format, like HTML, PDF, PostScript, or straight ASCII text. If you bootleg Word, you are increasing the acceptability of the Word format as "standard".
I recommend that if you don't have to accept Word documents (e.g. for work) that you refuse them. Don't support a proprietary, closed, pseudo-standard.
Bootlegging often means participating in an ugly underground. If you download bootleg software from warez d00d FTP/FSP/Hotline sites, you're promulgating the warez culture, even if you don't regard yourself as a warez d00d. (Naturally, not all bootleg software is distributed this way. Here, I'm only addressing that which is.)
The warez culture is uncreative, often intolerant, and (unlike the free-software culture) has little respect for the creation of original works. (If warez d00dz were interested in originality, they wouldn't all want to be running the latest, greatest version of Windows.)
Because their critique of "intellectual property" goes no deeper than "I will copy this because I can, nyah nyah!" d00dz don't tend to be interested in actually improving the world through the reform of IP laws. They're rebelling; if IP laws went away, they'd lose something to rebel against.
What warez d00dz do value is status. One earns status by making bootlegged software available: running a popular Hotline site, for instance. If you patronize a particular warez site, you may well be boosting its operator's status among other warez d00dz.
Further, warez d00dz and script kiddies often go hand in hand. The culture's largely the same: both value doing unoriginal, illegal things for the sake of doing them, regardless of damage caused. And script kiddies we could all certainly do without.
If this ugly culture is not reinforced, it will die out. If you participate in it by using warez sites, you are promulgating it.
Bootlegging discourages participation in the writing of free software. If you have an option between using a bootleg program and using a free-software program which does substantially the same thing, and you pick the bootleg program, then you're harming the improvement of the free program.
If you use a free program, you will learn more about it; you may be able to help its development by making bug reports, feature suggestions, documentation, or even patches and improvements; and you will increase its mindshare and installed base.
If you distribute bootleg software instead of distributing free software, you are losing the opportunity to promulgate the latter. You're also increasing the world's dependency on proprietary software (see the first point, above).
Even if there is no free-software equivalent to a particular piece of closed software, if the closed software is widely disseminated, it may well reduce the perceived need for that functionality in free software. This would decrease the chance of someone writing it.
Bootlegging at work exposes your employer to risks. Many workplaces, mine included, casually bootleg software. The common reasons for this are that software licenses are too expensive, and that it is impractical to keep track of the number of copies installed.
However, this is a great risk. A few years ago, my workplace's parent organization was audited by a software-industry group (the SPA, I believe), and found to have a great deal of unlicensed software. They ended up spending a great deal of money getting out of that hole.
If your workplace bootlegs software, you should consider drawing this risk to your employers' attention. Audits do happen. Audits have been used by Microsoft to coerce businesses into adopting expensive, MS-exclusive licenses in order to avoid lawsuits.
And if your employer isn't interested in spending the huge sums of money that license-compliance would cost, or in keeping track of installed copies... what a great opportunity to recommend free software!
The biggest misconception about piracy are company "losses".
Just because someone valued a piece of software enough to make a pirated copy does not mean they would have bought it otherwise.
Even if piracy were impossible, not everyone that does pirate software would purchase that same software. Some can't justify the cost; others couldn't even afford the cost. There are also those who make a pirated copy just because they "might need it someday".
Companies whining about all the money they lost are ignoring thses facts to distort the situation.
There are even some cases (at least for me) where I wouldn't have pruchased or been able to purchase a piece of software if I hadn't split the cost witha friend (and then made a copy).
I'm not trying to advocate piracy here, but I'm tired of the corporate whining by those whose loses to piracy (even if adjusted for these factors) is several times my total potential lifetime income.
Re:"Losing" Money to Piracy
by
Afrosheen
·
· Score: 3
A few months ago Macworld had an article on piracy. It didn't advocate it or have a condescending tone (like so many people here have had). I believe David Pogue was the author, and the article basically told the story of some random War3z kid. At the end of the article, he made a very good point. Most of the warez traded on the net are traded by teenage boys. They open private FTP and Hotline servers. They trade Flash4 before it's available for sale. So what. What do these kids do with them? Burn a CD. What happens to it after that? Not a damn thing in most cases. Pogue made the brilliant observation that for war3z kiddies, it's a hobby like baseball cards. You trade software worth hundreds of dollars and never even use the app. Bragging rights for dorks basically. For a company to say that they're losing money to these kids, which arguably make up 90% of the pirated software world, is utter bullshit and should be treated as such. Take this example: you happen to get the blueprints and the parts to build an Acura NSX. Everything sits in your garage boxed up and you never put it together. In fact, one day you throw it all out. Did Acura lose money on this little clandestine act? No. Did it hurt their company overall? No. If a thousand people did the exact same thing, they still wouldn't be losing money. The point is, to me, most applications are made to accomplish a specific task. 3dsMax renders animations. If you buy the program, use it in your 3d shop, and sell the animation you've accomplished a money-making task. If you pirate the software, install it, say 'goddamn this is crazy and complicated' and delete it, who cares. NOBODY LOSES MONEY. Of course, there are exceptions, like the Glamour Shots lab in Oklahoma City where I used to work. Pirated software all over the place, man oh man if they ever get audited.. That's the cases in which piracy really is wrong.
What about your collection of MP3's Rob? Doesn't that legally constitute as piracy?;-)
It kinda' irks me that most software can't be taken back to the place of purchase for a refund once it's been opened, so I copy stuff on occasion & try it out first. If I don't like it, I remove it, if I do like it, I buy it. I think it's fair to do that, after all, I wouldn't buy a car without test-driving it first. Buying cars would be quite an ordeal if you had to pay for them first & were required to return them to Detroit if you didn't like them.
-Rev. Randy
-- -
Kate
"DNA is life. The rest is just translation."
US software companies alone reported $3 billion in "losses" due to piracy. They didn't actually lose that much money to piracy. That figure is assuming that for each pirated package, there was a 100% possibility of the person paying for the software if they hadn't pirated it. This, of course, isn't reasonable at all. I, personally, wouldn't have paid $500 for photoshop or illustrator if I hadn't pirated them. I simply can't afford to throw down $1k for software. But, since I pirated them and used them for personal use for a while, I chose to buy both of those and several other adobe products at work. The study is critically flawed if it says that the software companies actually lost $3 billion to piracy.
My 'piracy' is GOOD for the industry!
by
Zen
·
· Score: 3
I freely admit it, and I am not going to log out to play anonymity. I am what you are calling a software pirate. Every single piece of software on my machine (configuration changes DAILY) was not paid for. I only have official, original cd's for Win95, 98, and NT4, which I got from work, but still never paid for myself. I also have a recent build of Windows 2000 installed, and have been running Windows 2000 (NT5) for 8 months or so. I currently have around a hundred assorted programs and games installed on my computer, including office, plus, many various multimedia programs & suites, website managers and html editors, mp3 programs, and a dozen or so of the latest greatest games.
I surf the newsgroups, warez sites, and trade with friends on a daily basis. I try out every piece of software that I can get my hands on that sounds like it might be remotely useful for something, regardless of whether or not I have a use for it right now.
Why is all this 'illegal' material on my computer? I am a full-time college student. What I am doing is becoming familiar with as many different programs used for as many different applications as I can. This makes me highly knowledgable, highly productive, and a much sought after commodity in the marketplace. This is good for the industry because when I am put on a job I already know what software is the best solution for the job, and I can tell my boss outright what they should buy without them having to spend any money researching the many different product lines. Widespread knowledge about the faults, down falls, limitations, etc of different products leads to the elimination of the products that are hard to use, or don't do what you need them to do. Without a doubt, this is a good thing. Granted, there are many educational discounts available, but for the most part, a lot of software is crap! How do you find this out, except by trying it out? Demo's and non-timeout software is pointless. If you don't get to try all the features, how do you know if the other features are good enough to warrant purchasing the software?
I don't have a copy of the letter handy, but there is a letter that has been floating around in the warez newsgroups for a year or so. This letter was supposedly written by the author of a piece of software on why he thought that cracking his software was a good idea! Obviously, since I don't have a copy I don't remember all his points, but I remember a couple. He said that it was very flattering to have his software cracked, because that meant that people actually liked it, and that he was doing something right with his software.
The software industry isn't even losing any money on me, because I never had, nor intend to buy the software. Just because I have a copy of it does not mean that there is a chance in hell of me purchasing it, it might mean that I tried it out, and found it to be the buggiest piece of software I had ever used. How do they come up with the statistics anyway? The people that pirate software aren't just sitting around tallying up every piece of software they have, and give it to the proper authorities so it can be put in their nice little spreadsheet are they? No way! So how can they say with a straight face that they are losing all this money, and give an actual dollar amount, when prices for products sold through different venues is vastly varied, they don't know what software is being stolen, and they don't know exactly who is doing it (or we would all have been fined by now).
Food for thought. Anyone want to try to refute me?
Re:My 'piracy' is GOOD for the industry!
by
rm+-rf+/etc/*
·
· Score: 5
I'll refute you.
Pirating software is illegal. Period. You may not agree with this, you don't have to. But what you are effectively saying above is that it's okay to pirate software becase a) the company is not loosing money (which is not correct by the way) b) it is advantageous to you to have the software and c) it is advantageous to others for you to have the software.
Now my question is, does any of this change the fact that it is illegal? Nope. So are you telling me that it's okay to break the law because it is beneficial to me? Cool, maybe I'll go rob a bank. I mean, I need the money, and if I have the money, I can spend it which befefits the retail market. And I won't hurt anyone, plus the bank is insured, so they don't lose out either. And the government? They can always make more money! It's perfect.
As for the software industry not losing money on you, that's the common "I'm only one person" mentality. Everybody thinks, company A isn't going to be making any money on me anyway, so they aren't loosing anything on me. If everbody thinks that way, then no one will buy the software. That's loosing money. And look at the issue here, when you graduate and get a good paying job, are you going to buy new software, or keep using the old warez?
Slashdot Mirror
Vietnam? Singapore? China? Taiwan? Um, isn't western style IP law absent in those nations. Ever heard of a big company called Son May Records in Taiwan? They COPY CDs, movies, and software and sell the copies for cheap. They are a legal business locally (not kids in a basement). They follow local laws. Their company is licensed, pays taxes, and is regulated like any other business. In short, they are not criminals. How arrogant it is for someone in another nation to decree, based on their own local laws, to decree the foreign legal entity to be "criminal". Get a clue! The world is a big place and *your* rules and *your* morality simply do not operate everywhere. And both you and they are "right" simultaneously. Just accept it.
Say a company is selling a software program. They calculate that a reasonable price for the program, based on the expenses incurrend and potential market, is about $40. Then, they look at this study. If only two out of every five people will use theur software, they'll need to charge more to recoup their losses. To make the same amount of money, they'll need to charge $100 per copy. (Assuming that the higher price doesn't chase off more people.) Then, they can point back to that 2/5 study and claim that they're losing 3/5 of their possible income, or $300 for every five people using their software!
Maybe no one's that drastic, but the claim that "piracy makes software prices higher" should immediately indicate that multiplying "pirated" copies by product cost is nowhere near an accurate calculation for "losses". Throw, ans many other comments have, in the fact that many "piraters" wouldn't buy to full version anyway, and you have virtually meaningless numbers.
--Phil (I once illicitly copied software. The world of Free Software has shown me another way.)
355/113 -- Not the famous irrational number PI, but an incredible simulation!
(Please note the subject line. "Piracy" is a bad metaphor for software copyright and license violation, because it refers to violent crime on the high seas. "Bootlegging", which refers to trafficking in contraband [specifically, alcohol during Prohibition] is a better, if less commonly used, metaphor for the activity.)
... what a great opportunity to recommend free software!
Bootlegging spreads bad software. It's true that Microsoft encourages, or at least tolerates, bootlegging in order to gain mindshare and installed base. Every system running MS-Windows, and every system running MS-Office, is a gain for Microsoft. It's a bigger gain if it's paid for, but even if it isn't, it increases the general atmosphere of lock-in.
Those who believe that it's ethically okay to bootleg software one wouldn't buy should take this to heart. When a friend emails you an MS-Word document and you haven't licensed Word, you have a choice: You can bootleg Word, or you can ask your friend to send you the document in an open format, like HTML, PDF, PostScript, or straight ASCII text. If you bootleg Word, you are increasing the acceptability of the Word format as "standard".
I recommend that if you don't have to accept Word documents (e.g. for work) that you refuse them. Don't support a proprietary, closed, pseudo-standard.
Bootlegging often means participating in an ugly underground. If you download bootleg software from warez d00d FTP/FSP/Hotline sites, you're promulgating the warez culture, even if you don't regard yourself as a warez d00d. (Naturally, not all bootleg software is distributed this way. Here, I'm only addressing that which is.)
The warez culture is uncreative, often intolerant, and (unlike the free-software culture) has little respect for the creation of original works. (If warez d00dz were interested in originality, they wouldn't all want to be running the latest, greatest version of Windows.)
Because their critique of "intellectual property" goes no deeper than "I will copy this because I can, nyah nyah!" d00dz don't tend to be interested in actually improving the world through the reform of IP laws. They're rebelling; if IP laws went away, they'd lose something to rebel against.
What warez d00dz do value is status. One earns status by making bootlegged software available: running a popular Hotline site, for instance. If you patronize a particular warez site, you may well be boosting its operator's status among other warez d00dz.
Further, warez d00dz and script kiddies often go hand in hand. The culture's largely the same: both value doing unoriginal, illegal things for the sake of doing them, regardless of damage caused. And script kiddies we could all certainly do without.
If this ugly culture is not reinforced, it will die out. If you participate in it by using warez sites, you are promulgating it.
Bootlegging discourages participation in the writing of free software. If you have an option between using a bootleg program and using a free-software program which does substantially the same thing, and you pick the bootleg program, then you're harming the improvement of the free program.
If you use a free program, you will learn more about it; you may be able to help its development by making bug reports, feature suggestions, documentation, or even patches and improvements; and you will increase its mindshare and installed base.
If you distribute bootleg software instead of distributing free software, you are losing the opportunity to promulgate the latter. You're also increasing the world's dependency on proprietary software (see the first point, above).
Even if there is no free-software equivalent to a particular piece of closed software, if the closed software is widely disseminated, it may well reduce the perceived need for that functionality in free software. This would decrease the chance of someone writing it.
Bootlegging at work exposes your employer to risks. Many workplaces, mine included, casually bootleg software. The common reasons for this are that software licenses are too expensive, and that it is impractical to keep track of the number of copies installed.
However, this is a great risk. A few years ago, my workplace's parent organization was audited by a software-industry group (the SPA, I believe), and found to have a great deal of unlicensed software. They ended up spending a great deal of money getting out of that hole.
If your workplace bootlegs software, you should consider drawing this risk to your employers' attention. Audits do happen. Audits have been used by Microsoft to coerce businesses into adopting expensive, MS-exclusive licenses in order to avoid lawsuits.
And if your employer isn't interested in spending the huge sums of money that license-compliance would cost, or in keeping track of installed copies
Just because someone valued a piece of software enough to make a pirated copy does not mean they would have bought it otherwise.
Even if piracy were impossible, not everyone that does pirate software would purchase that same software. Some can't justify the cost; others couldn't even afford the cost. There are also those who make a pirated copy just because they "might need it someday".
Companies whining about all the money they lost are ignoring thses facts to distort the situation.
There are even some cases (at least for me) where I wouldn't have pruchased or been able to purchase a piece of software if I hadn't split the cost witha friend (and then made a copy).
I'm not trying to advocate piracy here, but I'm tired of the corporate whining by those whose loses to piracy (even if adjusted for these factors) is several times my total potential lifetime income.
--
Erskin
geek.
What about your collection of MP3's Rob? Doesn't that legally constitute as piracy? ;-)
It kinda' irks me that most software can't be taken back to the place of purchase for a refund once it's been opened, so I copy stuff on occasion & try it out first. If I don't like it, I remove it, if I do like it, I buy it.
I think it's fair to do that, after all, I wouldn't buy a car without test-driving it first. Buying cars would be quite an ordeal if you had to pay for them first & were required to return them to Detroit if you didn't like them.
-Rev. Randy
- Kate
"DNA is life. The rest is just translation."
US software companies alone reported $3 billion in "losses" due to piracy. They didn't actually lose that much money to piracy. That figure is assuming that for each pirated package, there was a 100% possibility of the person paying for the software if they hadn't pirated it. This, of course, isn't reasonable at all. I, personally, wouldn't have paid $500 for photoshop or illustrator if I hadn't pirated them. I simply can't afford to throw down $1k for software. But, since I pirated them and used them for personal use for a while, I chose to buy both of those and several other adobe products at work. The study is critically flawed if it says that the software companies actually lost $3 billion to piracy.
I freely admit it, and I am not going to log out to play anonymity. I am what you are calling a software pirate. Every single piece of software on my machine (configuration changes DAILY) was not paid for. I only have official, original cd's for Win95, 98, and NT4, which I got from work, but still never paid for myself. I also have a recent build of Windows 2000 installed, and have been running Windows 2000 (NT5) for 8 months or so. I currently have around a hundred assorted programs and games installed on my computer, including office, plus, many various multimedia programs & suites, website managers and html editors, mp3 programs, and a dozen or so of the latest greatest games.
I surf the newsgroups, warez sites, and trade with friends on a daily basis. I try out every piece of software that I can get my hands on that sounds like it might be remotely useful for something, regardless of whether or not I have a use for it right now.
Why is all this 'illegal' material on my computer? I am a full-time college student. What I am doing is becoming familiar with as many different programs used for as many different applications as I can. This makes me highly knowledgable, highly productive, and a much sought after commodity in the marketplace. This is good for the industry because when I am put on a job I already know what software is the best solution for the job, and I can tell my boss outright what they should buy without them having to spend any money researching the many different product lines. Widespread knowledge about the faults, down falls, limitations, etc of different products leads to the elimination of the products that are hard to use, or don't do what you need them to do. Without a doubt, this is a good thing. Granted, there are many educational discounts available, but for the most part, a lot of software is crap! How do you find this out, except by trying it out? Demo's and non-timeout software is pointless. If you don't get to try all the features, how do you know if the other features are good enough to warrant purchasing the software?
I don't have a copy of the letter handy, but there is a letter that has been floating around in the warez newsgroups for a year or so. This letter was supposedly written by the author of a piece of software on why he thought that cracking his software was a good idea! Obviously, since I don't have a copy I don't remember all his points, but I remember a couple. He said that it was very flattering to have his software cracked, because that meant that people actually liked it, and that he was doing something right with his software.
The software industry isn't even losing any money on me, because I never had, nor intend to buy the software. Just because I have a copy of it does not mean that there is a chance in hell of me purchasing it, it might mean that I tried it out, and found it to be the buggiest piece of software I had ever used. How do they come up with the statistics anyway? The people that pirate software aren't just sitting around tallying up every piece of software they have, and give it to the proper authorities so it can be put in their nice little spreadsheet are they? No way! So how can they say with a straight face that they are losing all this money, and give an actual dollar amount, when prices for products sold through different venues is vastly varied, they don't know what software is being stolen, and they don't know exactly who is doing it (or we would all have been fined by now).
Food for thought. Anyone want to try to refute me?
A recent poll of Canadians showed that the majority of people thought that stealing a candy bar was worse than software piracy...