Top 10 highest and lowest software piracy rates in 2009
Highest Piracy
Georgia 95%
Zimbabwe 92%
Bangladesh 91%
Moldova 91%
Armenia 90%
Yemen 90%
Sri Lanka 89%
Azerbaijan 88%
Libya 88%
Belarus 87%
Lowest Piracy
US 20%
Japan 21%
Luxembourg 21%
New Zealand 22%
Australia 25%
Austria 25%
Belgium 25%
Finland 25%
Sweden 25%
Switzerland 25%
Now my first response is: Duh, poorer countries have a higher % of pirated software.
My second response is: Just how much money are the software companies really losing in Georgia? I’m guessing there just isn’t that much software being used there yet.
My third response was: So if the current model isn’t working, what would?
Key discs (You must have the disc in the computer to run the software) didn’t work.
Passwords didn’t work.
Software that limited the number of computers you can load on didn’t work.
Having your software registration validated online each time seems to have died.
So what will work?
Pricing structure changes - I just can’t make myself pay some of the software prices out there. I’ve chosen to do without, obiously others haven’t.
A “rental” system, when you pay a monthly fee, and get access to some of the bigger software suites. I’m thinking of some of the Paintshop/Corel kind of programs that I might use occasionally, but won’t pay a couple hundred $ for.
This is like those claims that fare-dodgers on public transport are causing x amount of losses.
If nobody was sat in that seat(or taking up that standing position) then how can someone who has not paid their fare be costing the company any money? The bus/train/coach has to go from A to B however many passengers are on it!
I am a software developer and have lived for a time in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia. Lots of software is used there, it’s mostly pirated though. I worked for two different newspapers and I’m sure their software was not legit… same goes for several NGOs I was familiar with.
I think online registration is a good solution for now, but I also know anything can be broken. It certainly affects my income. I have no pirated software on my machine, but unfortunately, it is so easy to copy that for most people, this is not the case.
It helps if the software vendor has something to offer besides the software itself (e.g. ongoing support that contributes significantly to the usefulness of the product) that can easily be granted or denied based on confirmation of purchase.
I work for an American software company in Asia, and granted Georgia is on top, But the big piracy markets such as China and India are not even on the list. In terms of quantity, they are much worse.
The answer to the thread question is “no, there aren’t any real solutions.” As evidence for this, I present the Humble Bundle. The Humble Bundle is a bundle of great indie games including titles like World of Goo and Aquaria. Wolfire Games set it up so you can pay whatever you want for the bundle, and donate as much of what you pay as you want to associated charities. Once you buy the bundle, you can play the games on any platform you want with no DRM. They effectively removed every mealy-mouthed justification for piracy you can come up with. And still, 25% of people playing the games have pirated it. As the cofounder of Wolfire Games Jeffery Rosen said: “I think piracy is absolutely inevitable—this is a really clear example of it. People will literally not pay a penny to a charity in order to legitimately get a bundle of games that they want.”
There is all sorts of speculation as to why people do it. I suspect it comes down to laziness and utter unaccountability.
First, as already stated, piracy doesn’t cost the software industry anywhere near $51 billion dollars. It’s nonsense to consider each pirated copy a net loss in sales equal to the retail price. Plus, piracy increases legitimate sales as well. I do not claim to know how much it costs the industry, but it is likely much less than they estimate.
Second, there are no real solutions to prevent piracy as a whole. There is a great book by Chris Anderson that deals with piracy, and other related issues, called Free. Accordingly, you can find it for sale onAmazon, or with a little googling, on nearly every big torrent website for free as both an ebook, and an audiobook. Why? Because as he argues in the book:
Basically, digital media will always be subject to economic gravity. As long as the cost of making another copy of Windows, or Photoshop costs the manufacturer almost nothing, the value of each additional copy will be almost nothing as well. You can put up all sorts of barriers, codes, etc., but they will be broken, or they will deter legitimate users who don’t want the hassle.
The way that you combat piracy is by recognizing this reality, and making money utilizing a business model that allow you to make money in other ways (eg. Google, Facebook, Hulu, Ad-aware, etc.). Some business models that fit this mold include “freemium”, ad-supported, and cross-subsidization, among others.
Yeah, I’m kind of with ivan. 80% of the U.S. and 79% of Japan, etc. are paying for the software - the companies can’t seriously claim that Georgia or Zimbabwe are even part of their target markets, any more than, say, Jaguar could claim the same. Of course, if 20% of Jaguar’s merchandise was being stolen in the U.S. it would be a big deal, but that’s the risk you run with selling software rather than automobiles. I’d imagine the pirated software in the industrialized West would affect profits more than pirated software in third-world countries where it would be unlikely to be sold in the first place.
So I’ve heard. I recall an interview with one of the people behind the Sins of a Solar Empire game, which has no copy protection, that part of the secret of success to selling software without protection is don’t make anything that will appeal to the Chinese market.
He also said IIRC that a good deal of the inflated piracy claims we hear are simply attempts to cover up failure; instead of admitting that your product is garbage and people aren’t interested, just claim that people love it but are stealing it.
Only if they can convince people to buy them. That’s been a problem with quite a few “anti-piracy” measures; they make the product sufficiently unattractive or outright dangerous to use (such as the ones that can damage computers) that people don’t buy them. And, by mistreating their customers in the name of fighting piracy, they cede the moral high ground to the pirates. And in some cases even let the pirates produce a superior product to the legal one because the anti-piracy measures are so crippling; there are even people who buy the legitimate product but download and use the pirated version because the pirated version is simply superior.
On the flip-side it costs you and me more money to buy software because software developers often go to extreme lengths to copy-protect their software. That is not cheap and the cost of that gets rolled into development costs.
Frankly I am amazed they keep running around in circles trying ever more draconian copy protection schemes that are expensive and usually only serve to piss off their legitimate customers. Never say never but I suspect there has never been a copy protection scheme that wasn’t gotten around by hackers in short order. Sometimes embarrassingly short order (IIRC once before the product was even released on the street).
To me the best copy protection is some registration scheme and maybe some file protection to stop casual copying. If it is as simple as doing a cut-and-paste onto a burnable CD more people will do it. If you put a few minor hurdles in the way of casual copiers that will take care of much of it. Those who will work harder to copy software won’t be dissuaded anyway so the company should save themselves and their customers the headache and money.
This is the answer. Yes, it can cost a lot to develop an application. But after you’ve created the app, the marginal cost of creating a copy of the app is zero. And so the expectation that you can recoup your development costs by charging lots of money for each copy is naive.
And so the future of piracy is that people will stop spending lots of money to develop applications, because they won’t be able to prevent piracy. We’ll rely on incremental improvements to applications, and those improvements will be distributed free. The people making the improvements will be people who want to solve a particular problem they have, and so they have to write their own code, and after they’ve solved the problem it doesn’t cost them anything to let other people copy their fix.
Piracy is never going away. There’s no technical solution that can’t be hacked. And there’s no cultural solution that works either. Sure, you might convince some people. But on a planet of 6 billion people, you’re not going to convince many that piracy is like stealing. And that’s because copyright violation is kind of like stealing in some ways, but it isn’t like stealing in other ways.
So there isn’t much future, long term, in developing complex software and selling copies for a high margin. So if you want to make money in software, you’re going to have to change your business model. And that might include getting out of the software business. It’s sad that you can’t make a living doing this, but the business model is like putting up posters of your artwork all over town, then trying to get people to mail you money every time the see the poster.
As I just said earlier, people will pirate stuff regardless of the DRM issues. Pirates use that as a way to justify their piracy (mostly), not because of any legitimate DRM issues.
As far as I can tell, the only part of the industry that has any sort of “serious” piracy problem in the “western world” is PC games.
Adobe and Microsoft probably get pirated the most, but most of the people doing the copying are not their target customers anyway (students, hobbyists and the poor of the world are not likely to spend over 1000 euros on CS4 even if they could afford it. That’s why Adobe has +/- 80% student discounts and trivial copy protection). “Serious” software is aimed at companies, and companies at least over here tend to have their licenses in order. A 1000 euros a seat every couple of years means nothing if you’re a company, and getting everybody else “hooked on the first free try” is just the mechanism that keeps them in business.
The problem with PC games is that they’re targeted at exactly the demographic that has the least problems with “piracy”, not all that much money and a platform that makes it positively trivial to get and install pirated software (richer kids that are really into games probably have one or two consoles).
Ah, the old demonize the customer routine. No, customers aren’t really human; they don’t resent having their computers damaged or being treated as criminals or having crippled products foisted off on them; customers are demonic entities who will pirate for the sheer joy of pirating. Mistreatment has no effect at all on them.
Did you not see my earlier post? People pirate games with no DRM whatsoever, when all you need to do to legitimately get the product is pay 1 cent to a charity. Spare me the melodrama.