Want a recipe for being pirated less? Make something that people wouldn't want to get for free. crickets chirp Actually, that probably won't even help -- I think a large portion of piracy is essentially pathological. Bingo Card Creator -- an which assists primary school English teachers who are, on average, not likely to be reading Chinese pirate forums -- got spikes of 10k+ downloads when the new cracks were released.
It even had a description translated into Chinese... which was hilarious. (My brother translated for me: "Apparently it's like a gambling game for English or some shit.")
Honestly its like putting a shiny object in front of that bird with the unhealthy fascination for shiny objects whose name I am forgetting at the moment. If your code compiles, it will be pirated. You could make a Windows forms calculator with only a plus button, with an equals sign available with a CD Key, and people would pirate that. (I've often thought of trying it.)
Made me think of this:
http://blort.org/~kgasso/images/how-to-catch-script-kiddies....
Money is not an unlimited resource.
If there are say.. $4,000 (purchase price) of fun and awesome things released in a year, and the average person after things like bills, rent/mortgage, etcetera only has say.. $500 left to actually spend on frivolity, then they might decide the following:
"Well, I guess I will download the rest. It's not like they are losing a sale. I don't HAVE any money, anyway!".
And, if this is the case, it's true. No-one actually LOSES anything. You can't lose a sale you could never have made anyway.
So such numbers can be shockingly misleading.
For example, console games don't suffer as much from pirating, but what if hypothetically it was as easy to pirate a game for your Wii or 360 as it was for your PC? I very much doubt that people would continue to buy the games.
So basically, the very presence of pirated games available for free is taking sales away from the game makers, people are simply choosing the free option.
While it is true that someone downloading a game that they couldn't have paid for doesn't deprive the maker of money, it's quite a slippery slope.
In fact, the most effective anti-piracy software development strategy is the simplest one of all:
1. Have a great freaking product.
2. Charge a fair price for it.
I would attribute it to wishful thinking based on an assumption of human morality. The truth is that people are lazy and don't consider the morality of their actions. How else can the rampant piracy of tv shows freely available on hulu.com be explained? The commercials are very short and the quality is good. Pirates are in the habit of getting their software from bittorrent and don't even look for a legal method of obtaining the software they use.
Bittorrent, on the other hand, doesn't much care where in the world you are.
I do this with music (I recently dropped illegal art a sum of money equal to what I've downloaded due to Girl Talk and a few other awesome artists on that label).
In some developing countries, USD20 is about a day salary or 10 meals.
That figure'd be a lot more useful if we knew what the usual piracy rate is.
One of the many reasons I joined hacker news was to meet like minded people for possible future collaboration. Sometimes you really get to know each other here.
AFAIC, there is no gray area in ethical matters. Right is right and wrong is wrong. If you use situational ethics to justify what is clearly wrong, you may have made an interesting argument, but you have also done one other thing: you have automatically disqualified yourself from ever doing business with me (and probably many others here, I suspect.)
A little background:
I once wrote some software that a partner installed in a remote client site for which our company got paid. Unbeknowst to me, he also installed that software at another site and kept all the money.
I bought the used car from one of my partners at an agreed upon price and found out later that he had disconnected the speedometer for as many as 50,000 miles.
Another partner of mine had a side business selling hardware and negotiated a backroom deal with our customer that jeapordized our major project.
One IT director where I worked had software salesmen leave their documentation for "project review", photocopied it, and used it for our own functional specs, with no intention of ever buying anything.
Starting to get the idea of how "you wouldn't have made any money anyway" easily morphs into "fuck you"?
And as far as software pirating goes, I have only this to say:
If you steal from me, I will seek recourse any way I can. Period.
And for those of you who want to debate ethical considerations here at hacker news, you may want to think twice about the persona you end up revealing in this public forum.
Likewise. You might want to take heed of your own advice.
If you're treating everyone you do business with as people that will potentially rip you off, I wouldn't want to work with you. Its amazing at how quickly "Good intentions to prevent piracy" morph into "But my product cant be pirated. Fuck the customers. They're all crooks anyway."
For better or worse, I stand by everything I've ever posted here.
If you're treating everyone you do business with as people that will potentially rip you off
That's a leap you made, not me. I have always given everyone I've ever worked with every opportunity to succeed. Once they take advantage of me, all bets are off.
I wouldn't want to work with you.
One less thing for either of us to worry about. See how well this forum works?
It's also possible that he just has a lot more life experience than you.
You should tell all brick and morter retail stores to get rid of their cameras, security and other security measures. If people are not willing to pay for their products and instead chose to just steal them they have obviously a failed business model.
Seriously, are you taking the piss?
I'm not saying I agree with RMS. However, if he is rational I would expect him to agree with his own (current) writings. I would also expect that on an issue where he disagrees with others, he would disagree with their writings.
Is this an actual effect? I feel like doing an experiment.
This example is a fairly mainstream idea... it made an appearance in the South Park movie.
If A is the set of people that've heard of your product sans piracy, and B is the people that've heard of it after piracy, then the gap between B' that pirates and B had better be smaller than the gap between A and B. That's likelier for a tiny producer than a huge one.
I'm wearing this as badge of honor. :-) Of course I treat this lightly because I think that less then a quarter of iPhones are jailbroken, so I know there is a fairly low upper limit to this, uhm, "free promotion" so to speak.
> writing a completely server-side application like World of Warcraft or Mint
But that is not true! World of Warcraft has lots of "private servers" where people play for free.
Developers have a perverted view, they think 90% of people are stealing their product. When really 90% of people wouldn't pay to use your product to begin with.
This is when DRM comes in and the developer tries to force this 90% to pay. However, people either hack the DRM or simply don't use the product. I imagine Linux got a lot more users when Microsoft started implementing DRM and some people didn't want to fight with it.
Adobe and Microsoft prices are ridiculous, why? Because they make money off the 10%, not off hunting the 90%. Microsoft doesn't even actively target pirates, it doesn't check every time you go to send an error report, it doesn't check every time you log in. Why? Because the 90% of people are an amazing resource to hunt down problems that will make the 10% pay even more, specifically big business.
He then implies some software "deserves" to be pirated, by claiming World of Goo falls outside that category (because it isn't from the "bowels" of a "faceless EA-Activision franchise sweatshop").
Many independent game developers don't view piracy as black and white. I would be interested in reading an article where someone makes a hypothesis one way or the other, and backs it up. This article isn't that.
And, for the record, the amended World of Goo piracy rate is 82%. 2D Boy mentions that in an update on the very same blog post Jeff links to, but I guess that would mean he would've had to read beyond the title to notice: http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/
It's pretty funny, since they're game developers, and some of them dream of becoming indies.
1. increase the unique value of the physical game package; include a T-shirt, stickers, something that makes possession of the package worthwhile to someone who's played the game long enough to identify with it; mention this addition in the intro or scores screen.
2. Run a contest on the scores server; if you are one of the high-scoring players this week and you can send in the code printed on the bottom of the box, then you get the reward. For greater psychological investment make the reward personalised with the players nick/score/rank on it.
This is one thing that makes SaaS so attractive to developers -- generally it's impossible to pirate.
To those who see only what is, not what can be.