Comments on: Piracy for the Masses

By: Daniel Howard

Daniel Howard — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 00:18:05 +0000

To begin with, people clearly feel that there is a difference between tangible property and intellectual property. Even the U.S. government makes a distinction: the words in a book are copyrighted from a certain number of years but the physical book itself can be owned exclusively by one person for an eternity. Since the copyright and the physical book seem different and are governed by different laws and even are “violated” differently, people don’t really equate violating the copyright with the theft of the physical book. They just aren’t the same and every attempt in the world to try to equate piracy with theft is going to be ignored by most people.

Second, intellectual property just isn’t covered in religion. The Bible, the Koran and nearly all other religious texts don’t cover it. Piracy is illegal but is it a sin? I think that there’s a pretty good case to say, “No, it’s not a sin.” (I’ll leave the long and involved argument to others.) You may agree or you may disagree but you can conclude that it isn’t obvious. It isn’t obviously a sin so it’s going to have less force than an obvious sin like physical theft. Physical theft is obviously both illegal and sinful so people are more concerned about that than, say, cheating on their income taxes.

Third, while I agree that piracy is illegal and should be avoided, I have little patience for businesspeople who know that piracy is rampant but build a very consumer oriented product which is prone to piracy and then complain about how the pirates drove them out of business or limited their success. Piracy is a fact and, if your business fails because it ignores that fact, then you are a lousy businessman. If you started a software business in the last 15 years using the assumption that you’d never lose a sale to piracy, then that’s your fault, not the world’s and not even the pirates’.

By: The Betamax Guillotine

The Betamax Guillotine — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 00:24:17 +0000

The Philosophical Economics of Piracy
From Nick Bradbury This week, 90% of the attempts to activate FeedDemon have been with cracked serial numbers. via Spitting Llamas: -snip- Take a more “productive” application that might help you create something else that you sell. Does that software

By: Patrick Schriner

Patrick Schriner — Sat, 01 Jan 2005 13:30:56 +0000

I would like to add that some companies profit enormeously from piracy, especially private piracy. There is a reason why all MS Software has such a ridiculous copy protection, while all game software if pretty protected. If you want a monopoly, it´s (for starters) way more productive for your end goal if everyone can use your software, even if they don´t pay. Once you´ve reached your target and destroyed the market you can still think about tightening on piracy.

Corporate Piracy is completely different, and that´s where the money is made.

Of course “small” software, that are target at a small audience, can suffer substantially from piracy.