When the software industry calculates their loss in revenue due to pirated software, do they take into consideration that a lot of people may not even have the software otherwise if it were not “free”?
Unlikely. I don’t see how than can even know how many illegal copies are running around. Same goes for video and music.
They can say stuff like, “Last year, we lost $200,000,000 to software pirates,” and yet they can’t come up with any real proof.
I am not in any way advocating piracy of any kind, but before I can feel sorry for Bill Gates and his peers, I wanna see some real numbers.
Are you implying that pirated software might be a business practice? Get the kiddies hooked on the 'leet cracked copies of your stuff so they’ll buy the Real Thing later on? I don’t think so: If a person downloads a cracked version in the first place, he isn’t interested in buying it or any version of it. Trying to reach that market (actually a very motivated anti-market, to coin a term) is futile. They will find a way to crack whatever protections you have or they will go without whatever you’re selling.
This is in contrast to the freeware/shareware crowd, where people knowingly download crippled versions of the real product, demoware with a time limit built in, or fully-functional standalone ‘light’ versions of beefier programs. That market may well be interested in buying a well-designed ‘upgrade’ of whatever they can get for free.
As for revenue lost to crackers (pirates are murderers and looters, crackers are thieves), those numbers are just pulled out of the air, maybe with some pseudo-math thrown in to give the number-crunchers something to do.
No, I was implying that some software is so highly priced that, unless they got a “cracked” version, then they would not have it at all. Either way, the software company would not have reveived money from this individual.
You know, Snetho, you just stated something I completely overlooked in my post: Revenue lost to crackers is zero, or close to it, because the crackers would never have bought the software anyway. The software corporations want to inflate it as much as possible to get government to Do Something (like the DMCA), but, rationally, crackers aren’t a market they can ever reach. It isn’t like a 7-11 saying it lost such-and-such to shoplifting last year (a real, verifiable cost of business) because software costs nothing to copy. The software makers don’t have that many less copies of their programs to sell because of the actions of crackers. Software makers make money by selling an intangible service (namely, programming your computer to do something useful), and they can’t sell it to those who aren’t interested in buying it, especially those who are so uninterested in buying they will go to lengths to either crack the software themselves or find a cracked copy.
Of course, I’m not advocating cracking anything, but take all pronouncements from the Industry with a few spoonsful of salt.
This really sounds like just another version of “Napster didn’t cost the record companies anything because I wouldn’t have bought their stuff anyway. I may have downloaded it but I’d never have bought it.”
And I’ve always found that to be pretty self-serving. Clearly their is, in each user of a ‘cracked’ piece of software, a demand for the use of that product. A lot of thought goes into the pricing of each product (or should, at least) and it’s aimed at maximizing revenue for the firm that controls the software. If you can’t afford it (which, in truth, I doubt most users of cracked software cannot) then you’re not a part of their purchasing equation. Your personal disposable income falls below the line that the software firm has determined their ‘ideal’ market to be.
Does that, for some reason, give the user a magical right to use the product anyway? I think not. All it means is that you want something without having the means to possess it.
The commercial software industry, like the movie and music industries, like to pretend that everyone who has an illegitimate copy would have bought it.
In reality, if Microsoft says “we estimate a loss of $200,000,000 due to pirated copies of Windows XP”, that means they estimate there are 1 million pirated copies floating around, and the retail price is $200.
The flaws in that logic are 1) it’s not a loss, because they are no poorer than they were before the copies were made, and 2) many (if not most) of the people using pirated copies wouldn’t have bought the software otherwise.
(In fact, Microsoft benefits from a larger installed base of Windows XP even if the copies are illegal. More users means a larger market for applications, which means more applications written for Windows, which means more incentive for people to use Windows. Of course this doesn’t apply to all pirated software.)
Buried somewhere in one of the government reports on piracy in the music industry was the comment that piracy actually increased sales of music! It seems that people would get a dub of an album/song from someone else and then go out and buy the album (and others by the artist) because they wanted things like cover art and liner notes. Now, I’m not saying that this happens with software, but I offer it as proof that you can’t believe what industry guys say about piracy.
Here’s another hypothetical to kick around as well: If it were impossible to crack software, it seem likely to me that it’d drive total software sales down. Why? Because some software you simply have to have (OS, word processor, etc.) in order to function. So instead of blowing $500 on gaming software, the guys who are now pirating stuff would have to spend it on the necessary software, thus leaving them with less dough to blow on games.
That’s an argument for piracy being morally wrong - the authors offer their software in exchange for money, you obtain the software without giving them any money. But are the authors actually being harmed?
Suppose I have two computers at home, and I’ve only bought one copy of Windows. If I’ve already determined that I can’t or won’t buy another copy of Windows, I can choose one of two options: do I illegally install one copy of Windows on both computers, or do I use a different OS on that machine? No matter which I choose, Microsoft is in exactly the same situation - they have made $200 from me.
-
-
- Well Microsoft certainly might have a good idea, because they offer periodic Windows updates through an interactive download manager (Windows Update). I haven’t ever heard of any ordinary Joe getting busted for installing his single-license OS on his second home PC, or of any loaded unlicensed install of Windows being turned down for updates, so certainly the capability of knowing is there.
-
- Well, no, because an illegal crack isn’t a sale, but people might buy software if they find that they can’t crack it. - DougC
Perhaps, but if they do, that will take money that they might have spent on other, cheaper software programs (like gaming software). If I have to shell out $100 for an OS, that’s $100 less I have to shell out on games (and since the average price for a game is around $50 or so, that’s two fewer software titles sold).
Funny story about cover art:
Back when Starcraft first came out, the guy who lived downstairs from me, who eventually got busted for sharing software illegally on the school’s LAN, fell in love with his cracked copy of Starcraft and went out and bought three copies, so he could have all three of the boxes. (One with a marine on the cover, one a Zerg something or other, and the third the Protoss cover.) I always thought that was odd.
Tenebras
Many of the guys who use pirate stuff wouldn’t blow $500 on gaming software. They’d get it for free just like everything else.
As somebody who writes software for a living let me just throw in my 2c (now that we’ve moved to the euro I can now say that 
)
Using pirated software, no matter what way you dress it up is wrong. As an analogy, pretend for a minute you didnt have cable tv but your neighbour did. If you tap in to his cable line and use it to get free cable does it make it OK if you say “well, ya know, I was never going to pay for cable anyway so it’s not costing the cable company anything”. This is basically the same argument a couple of people have already made. It doesnt stand up to much scrutiny does it?
While I agree that software piracy is wrong, there are some instances where no financial harm is done and therefore falls into the grey area of my moral code.
An example, a 14 year old middle class kid with a decent computer who is interested in computer graphics. He downloads a cracked version of 3D Studio Max to play around with. Let’s face it, he’s not a potential customer of AutoDesk (although he might be in the future if he chooses a career in graphics), so he’s not really hurting anyone.
This is from a person who writes software for a living, so I’m hardly on the side of pirates.
I should probably have added an additional scenario to the above example. If the kid decides to use his allowance to buy the latest sneakers, and therefore can’t afford to get Warcraft III, downloading a cracked version of WCIII is back to simple stealing in my book.
The whole; “I’m not stealing anything from the software developer because I wouldn’t/couldn’t use this software if I had to pay for it” is a load of crock. Why do we know it’s a load of crock? Because people lie, that’s why. We know this from experience. People lie about things all the time, especially if it means getting something for nothing, and their software procuring habits are no different.
Sure, it might be true. But unless we make it compulsory to have means testing and a lie detector reading before you’re allowed to pirate because you “can’t afford to buy it” or “wouldn’t use it if you had to pay” then we’re stuck with making software piracy illegal in all circumstances. We have to assume, incorrectly or not, that you are pirating the software because you want to freeload off everyone else who are paying for it.
“You know, Snetho, you just stated something I completely overlooked in my post: Revenue lost to crackers is zero, or close to it, because the crackers would never have bought the software anyway.”
What about people who make copy & sell that copy? There is alot of that going on. They make a copy, put a cd label on it, make a box, etc, & sell it for near retail of the real thing. I think that’s what they are refering to when they talk about pirated software.
Pirated versions of software don’t just magically “show up” on the hard drives of computer users. There has to be an active effort of the part of the pirater to find and download/acquire the software.
This means to me that there is a particular feature or function of the software that the pirater wants to use. They use it, and derive the benefit from it. But they didn’t pay for the use of that benefit.
Hence, stealing.
Don’t want to pay for it? Don’t use it. The fact that the benefit may not be worth the retail price of the software to you personally does not give you the right to steal it anyways. I personally feel that a BMW M5 is overpriced. It would still be nice to have though. Maybe I’ll swing by that dealership at about 3am and see what I can do about it.
And don’t give me the old “it cost the publisher nothing” crapola. While there may not be any incremental (i.e variable) costs to the copy you downloaded off the internet, the fixed costs of the publishers still need to be covered. And by not paying for the software, you are decreasing the denominator in the break-even equation.
There’s an example which hits close to home, since my husband gets royalties from 3D Studio Max.
You’re probably right in this case. However, I’ll throw out a new wrinkle, though perhaps it is not terribly significant. It’s probable that his cracked version is not going to function as it ought to, so he might get so disenchanted with it that he not only fails to become a future user, he might go also onto message groups and write about how “3D Studio Max Sux!” which isn’t doing Autodesk or discreet much good.
Mostly I chime in here to say that it really bothers me when someone says they don’t feel sorry for “Bill Gates or his ilk.” Call me Exhibit A: Note that I am not Bill Gates. I am a normal middle-class person. But when people pirate software instead of paying for it, it cuts into my family’s income. My husband does not get paid for intellectual property that he worked very hard on. It’s not just billionaires that miss out.