For every technological bar to piracy, there will be a technological workaround. What you need to do is make people not want to pirate your software, or at least make enough people not want to that they’ll still support you.
Some people do. Some people don’t. I find your claim that people robotically pirate things regardless of how well or badly they are treated ridiculous.
How is it justifiable to charge anyone a fare, in this case? It’s money for nothing, surely?
Uhhh ya. You said people pirate cuz of DRM, I demonstrated that games with no DRM still get pirated all to hell. Then you come back with some nonsense straw man. Well played.
Once you’re used to pirating games, that’s how you get everything. If you want a game, you go to your usual torrent. Even if there’s a free version on the official website, you’d have to spend five minutes finding the website.
And given the risk of credit card fraud, (and considering that many kids who pirate games don’t have credit cards in the first place), even a 1 cent transaction has risks. I know the thought of a pirate stealing someone’s work worrying about getting ripped off might sound a bit incongruous, but even thieves don’t want to be stolen from.
And a certain fraction of piracy is automatic piracy. People pirate games or music, and then never get around to using it. I mean, I’ve picked up plenty of free giveaway disks, and never bothered to install it, I’ve even got games that I paid for but never got around to playing.
The point is, you can’t beat free. If your business model requires you to charge people for something they can trivially get for free, your business model is broken. Whether your customers are scum for wanting something for nothing is irrelevant, they’ll still take something for nothing if taking that something is trivially easy.
For lots of public transportation the fare costs are well below the operating costs, and there isn’t much effort spent on enforcing fare payment. People don’t use public transportation subsidize it because they hope everyone else will use it, so they can drive on uncongested streets.
So at some point, it might make sense to stop bothering to pretend to charge fares, and just let people ride for free.
Assuming that’s even true - and I don’t trust the people involved to not simply be lying about it - that’s what you see after customers have been repeatedly burned by DRM and in general mistreated.
There still are legitimate reasons why people couldn’t get the Humble Bundle. Payment processing is slick and easy if you’ve got a credit card or a bank account (and are in the US), but for people without that, or in other countries, it may not be so easy. It doesn’t make it okay to pirate (and steal from charity) but there are reasons why people can’t buy it if they want it. And yeah, there will be people who pirate just to pirate, who pirate to demo, who pirate to ‘collect’ and never look at it, who pirate because they hate the company… none of these are lost revenues.
Ultimately there is no ‘solution’ to piracy. There’s no ‘solution’ to theft either. You put in reasonable methods that don’t hassle your customers too much; you give incentives to not pirate (e.g. the Steam model). When real customers pay for a software product then download a cracked version, there is something seriously wrong with the system.
Look, I understand they want to protect their product, but invasive or downright destructive DRM is not okay with me as a consumer. I can understand if Wal-Mart wants to prevent shrinkage, and that means I’m okay with security guards and reasonable measures. What I’m not OK with is having the product I’ve bought legitimately disappear or stop working if I don’t constantly prove it’s mine! I don’t want to be shaken down at the door and searched! Too many companies make it a huge pain in the ass to go legit because they’re soooo frightened of piracy, but it just scares away legit customers.
Call me dubious, but I find it hard to believe that you couldn’t find ANYONE with a credit card that you could give them 1 penny to make the contribution for you. I’m sure it happens somewhere in the world, but not for 25% of the user base.
Nobody ever sets out to install a shitty DRM. My company has struggled with DRMs for years trying to strike a balance between effective and unobtrusive. As of now, we generally lean towards the latter, but then our product is on the cheaper end of the software scale. If my company were selling products for several hundred dollars, we might be more inclined to make users jump through an extra hoop just to ensure they have purchased the product legally.
Oh for sure, I know all about it. Which gets back to my original point - there is no solution, and the cause is that people are lazy and totally unaccountable for their actions. Not saying this is necessarily the worst thing in the world, just the way it is.
Hilarious. You are totally willing to buy the alleged complaints of people who are stealing products due to flimsy DRM complaints*, but when a legitimate business trying to sell a product and donate up to 100% of the procedes to charity, based on customer desire tells you they are getting their product stolen, all of the sudden the eeeeeeevil corporation must be lying. And its their fault too, for trying to protect their product. So answer me this: Why would they lie about this? What would they stand to gain, considering they are pretty much giving this thing away for free?
*OK thats overstating a little, I have seen some odious DRMs in my day, but the vast majority of them are minorly painful at worst.
Of course people pirate when there is no DRM but, quite literally, people have been driven to pirate a product because of the DRM.
Case in point would be Ubisoft’s DRM scheme for Assassins Creed 2. The game required a permanent connection to Ubisoft’s DRM servers or it would cease to function. As anyone with a PC and internet connection knows their connections flake out occasionally. Lag spikes, router reboots, your provider resets something, sun spots…whatever.
For this game it would not save your progress and just unceremoniously dump you out of the game with no warning. Tough luck. If you have no internet connection you cannot play (so forget playing it while traveling).
As a result hordes of people who actually bought the game went out and got the pirated copy. People who may never have thought of a pirated copy learned the ropes thanks to Ubisoft’s absurd DRM. Ubisoft punished their paying customers and the pirates were the ones having a better experience. Hell, IIRC, the DRM thing got so bad that (eventually) Ubisoft finally issued a patch which was essentially the pirated code to stop the DRM.
Ubisoft earned a torrent of scorn and criticism for this and for them the worst part was most of that came from their customers who actually paid for the game.
Sony had their entry into the DRM arena end badly.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/11/sonys_drm_rootk.html
I dont deny that there are awful DRMs out there and they deserve the scorn they get (which is copious). But I have been using software extensively for 20+ years now, and can count the number of malicious DRMs I’ve run up against on 1 hand. Ubisoft has been loudly and soundly mocked for their online DRM debacle, which was a stupid idea in the first place since it was basically trying to do what Steam already did, and did better. But rather than pay the vig and put their game on Steam, they decided to reinvent a tricky and expensive wheel, and did so in the worst possible way. But this is an outlier case. To claim that a handful of bad drms absolves piracy in general is like going on a bankrobbing spree and justifying it by saying the bank issued atm card didn’t work for one day and you couldn’t get your cash.
The main bulk of the problem is obviously that piracy is free and easy. The only impediment to doing it is one’s own morality, in contrast to the actual impediments of having to pay money for legitmate software.
But clearly invasive DRMs don’t help, and when they do turn up, they can have long-lasting effects - they can foster the opinion that software companies are adversarial and/or evil, eroding the moral compunction to support them, and in extreme cases a terrible DRM can prompt people to pirate for the first time, and in the process show them just how much more pleasant piracy can be than buying, helpfully providing the worst possible buying experience for the purpose of the comparison.
And seriously, if you want to stop piracy, having the pirates feel like Robin Hood robbing from the Sheriff of Nottingham is not the way to do it.
Uh that seems like a very very very low number to me. Try doing the same with absolutely any other product and i guarantee you the results of any “you can have it for free but we’d like it if you paid us” experiment would result in much lower than a 75% rate of people actually paying for it.
I remember my first pirated games, back in the seventies. Then, copying a disk (even legitimately) took a very long time. To get a pirated game, you had to luck into knowing somebody who could break copy protection, spend hours upon hours downloading a copy from a BBS, or getting a copy from a friend.
Today, cracked copies are incredibly easy to find, copying takes a few minutes at most, and downloads happen at incredible speeds. It’s easy and fast to get a pirated copy.
I know of no solution. Any program can be cracked. The stronger you make the DRM, the more intrusive and annoying it is to paying customers.
The entertainment / software industry is in a bubble that is ready to burst. At one time, many barriers to entry existed and the industry controlled distribution. The internet has demolished these traditional obstacles to success, making the playing field much larger.
With everyone connected, anyone can introduce products or ideas into the market place. So as supply goes up, the price goes down. Once one copy is on the internet, it is almost free to pass it to everyone else. Content producers are going to have to realize that there will simply not be the same amount of money to be made in the industry as compared to the past if they continue the same models.
Like I implied with saying the bubble is bursting on the industry, changes in the market have made it so companies are overvaluing their own products (expecting to make more money than they will). At one time, you could expect people to drive to Best Buy and pay $90 for a piece of software that came in a big cardboard box with a bunch of paper manuals. That is no longer necessary, as everything is electronic now. So why would people still pay $90 for that software? They are not. Instead, they will pay $20 to download it along with .pdf manuals. Money is going to disappear. Traditional “I sell you this piece of code for $49.95” models will not succeed as compared to “I give you this product for free and you let me mine data” models.
It will be very difficult to make a lot of money off of a single program because people expect things on the internet to be free. There is always another product that does what your software does. Of course you can find a niche and make a bunch of money if you have a product that everyone uses, like Office. I think real success will come not from selling the code itself, but by tangentially making money off of the code. Basically, there will be more money in controlling the way people use software compared to selling the software directly.
Piracy is not something companies can defeat; they are only tilting at windmills. They would be best to learn from it and attempt to make a similar business model that would be profitable to them.
There are some games that don’t get pirated - on-line ones. This is going to be the solution. As we move to more reliable and higher bandwidth connections, more games are going to live on the cloud. You can pay a one time registration fee for unlimited use, or a per play fee. The consumer never gets the entire game, and so can’t pirate it.
If anyone is lazy, it’s the producers. I’m sorry, but the writing has been on the wall for a long time. Complaining because technology has advanced to the point where you can no longer charge more than your product is worth, with impunity, is pretty galling. Their failure to evolve to a new economic reality is, at this point, entirely their fault. While everybody deserves to be paid fairly for their work, but that doesn’t mean you get to frame morality in a way that is most economically advantageous to you.
Morality has nothing to do with it. Was it immoral for all those women in the 90’s to “steal” Jennifer Aniston’s haircut? Is it immoral for a restaurant to get menu ideas from another restaurant? Is it immoral to buy the same living room furniture as your neighbor?
I’ve both developed and used expensive EDA software for the design of chips - expensive in the $100K range. These are inherently complicated. There is pretty good licensing available. usually in pools so it can be shared across a company, legally.
I’ve heard of this stuff being pirated, but it doesn’t appear to be a gigantic problem. Pirates don’t get bug fixes, and since these are used by big companies, they have to decide whether the risk of a project crashing because of a bug in the software that can’t be fixed is worth saving the money.
I know of one company that had internal software which sent a usage report whenever run - really nice in justifying ones existence. One day they got a report coming from outside the company. This is harder to do on PCs, but workstations have hostids which can be easily tracked.
Things are immoral largely because we say so. So, as long as software piracy is successfully branded as theft and/or (more accurately) seen as depriving software developers of deserved fruits of their labors, software piracy will be seen as immoral, regardless of whatever vaguely analogous things you come up with that aren’t seen that way.
When software copying completely loses its moral stigma, of course, it will as a consequence lose its moral stigma. But that hasn’t happened yet for many-dare-I-say-most people.
ETA: If morality has nothing to do with it, why do you think anybody refrains from pirating? Fear of being caught? :dubious: