{"id":22,"date":"2004-09-17T23:49:26","date_gmt":"2004-09-18T06:49:26","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=22"},"modified":"2005-12-20T02:54:46","modified_gmt":"2005-12-20T10:54:46","slug":"software-piracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/archives\/2004\/09\/17\/software-piracy\/","title":{"rendered":"Software piracy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Apparently some software developers think it&#8217;s a good anti-piracy measure to sabotage a user&#8217;s computer.  There&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/news\/news.jsp?id=ns99994248\">one scheme that makes pirated games buggier<\/a>, and there are some <a href=\"http:\/\/developers.slashdot.org\/article.pl?sid=04\/09\/13\/1357202\">programs that delete your data if pirated<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s just retarded.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<p>\n<strong>You can&#8217;t lose something you never had.<\/strong>  Anti-piracy advocates always love to claim that the software industry loses billions of dollars each year to piracy.  Did developers actually <em>lose<\/em> money?  Did nasty pirates break into their bank accounts and withdraw all their cash?  The only thing that companies can claim to lose are <em>potential<\/em> sales.  Do they really believe that every pirate would have purchased their software if it were uncrackable?\n<\/p>\n<p>\n(Or maybe what the advocates really mean is that the software industry <em>wastes<\/em> oodles of money each year developing new and ultimately futile anti-piracy schemes.  That I&#8217;d believe.)\n<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<p>\n<strong>Who says there&#8217;s no such thing as bad publicity?<\/strong> If you want your software to act buggy if it thinks it&#8217;s pirated, go ahead, but don&#8217;t expect word-of-mouth reviews to be positive.  If anything, the presence of bugs, intentional or not, will make people <em>less likely<\/em> to give you money.  Will people be able to distinguish real bugs from the deliberate copy-prevention bugs?  Will people think your game is fun if its physics are amiss and their bullets keep missing?\n<\/p>\n<p>\nAnd if you destroy people&#8217;s data, forget it.  You&#8217;ve just guaranteed that you never, <em>ever<\/em> will see a dime from them or from anyone within complaining distance.  Congratulations, you&#8217;ve alienated potential customers.\n<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<p>\n<strong>Free advertising is better than bad publicity.<\/strong> To some degree, piracy <em>can help<\/em> software companies.  Piracy can help build name recognition.  It can lead to de facto standards.  Would Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office be as widespread if users didn&#8217;t copy them from their workplaces?  Piracy levels the cost of Windows down to $0, and at that price, it&#8217;s hard for Windows not to outcompete Linux.  Microsoft doesn&#8217;t gain money directly from this, but it does gain <em>market- and mind-share<\/em>.  As other examples, look at Adobe Photoshop, 3DS Max, and Maya.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nEven if you could make your software uncrackable, are your competitors&#8217; products uncrackable too?  Do you really want to drive your users&#8212;paying or not&#8212;to them?\n<\/p>\n<p>\nSoftware developers should be happy that people are using their products at all.\n<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In the end, I think <strong>the best defense is a strong offense.<\/strong> The best anti-piracy measure is to make a good product that&#8217;s worth buying.  People take pride in doing things that are worthwhile.  (And for goodness&#8217; sake, make sure your product is easy to buy!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Apparently some software developers think it&#8217;s a good anti-piracy measure to sabotage a user&#8217;s computer. There&#8217;s one scheme that makes pirated games buggier, and there are some programs that delete your data if pirated. That&#8217;s just retarded. You can&#8217;t lose something you never had. Anti-piracy advocates always love to claim that the software industry loses [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rantsraves"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}