Regarding the ratio of purchases/downloads, the argument goes back to the usual questions: 1) if the torrents didn't exist, how would the number of purchases change (i.e. are those lost sales, or were they never potential sales to begin with); and 2) what's the promotion channel for indie bands? I purchased a lot of music because I heard about it from someone who had a pirated copy. Now at least we've got Spotify discovery, Google music tailored radios, etc. working for us, but it's still not a lot.
2) For the mass audience, streaming solutions (99% of that being youtube), have completely replaced piracy. However, if you noticed, I'm not talking about mass audience, it stopped buying music anyway. I'm talking about Beatport, Juno — shops especially targeted at DJs, who have very different purchasing patterns, and usually different ways of learning about music as well. A significant part of modern electronic music labels have stopped doing digital releases altogether, going vinyl-only, and piracy is one of the main reasons.
In the case of most games, sales are steadily decreasing over time anyway - so it'd need to be a pretty marked step down to remove the possibility that they're simply following trend. It'd be interesting trying to account for that in an analysis.
Anecdotally, I have several friends who torrent games by default - but they legitimately wouldn't buy anyway (to quote "lol at buying videogames in the year of our lord 2016").
It only pushes out the small companies and makes way for an app store environment where only large companies can survive. The exact same thing happened with the music industry over the past decade (filesharing was supposed to help the indy artist..or so many, like you, claimed)
If you spend years of R&D on algorithms, patent them.
But boilerplate code can neither be patented nor copyrighted (except in its source form, but the binary, for example, can’t), so you never owned anything to begin with.
Disclaimer: This is just a general info about EU law, this is not legal advice, I am not a lawyer.
You realize Farnsworth ripped off Braun?
Also, if you have a patent, you can always sue. That’s not an issue.
Without even looking, if they're against you the chances are they're in the right. I've yet to see them do anything I disagree with as someone who considers those points very important.
This is a very dangerous attitude to have regardless of who it concerns.
You do realise that's not how research, science and engineering work right? Just because you think it's morally justifiable to "own an idea" doesn't mean it is morally justifiable to do so.
Besides, do you really think someone is going to supplant you that easily? If you're really worried, use the GPL and then use their improvements to improve your own work.
We all "mooch" off of other's talents. That's the beauty of our industry. We get inspired, we share, and we base our works on the works of others.
That's why its so important to pair huge investments in R&D with awesome business people. Don't obsess about protecting your inventions. Obsess about getting your inventions out there, selling, supporting, and custom tailoring it for what customers really need.
And it hurts that I careless about the code - it can be rewritten in a million ways. What I care about is what code does, and the multitude of GloboCorps working on the same issue in vane, and their ability to reproduce our work in months once they understand the secret sauce.
if the secret sause is so simple that they can copy it in months without violating copyright laws, may be it's not so saucy after all!
Data, whether code, or algorithm, is not physical, and therefore, unless you don't give the code out (e.g., sell via SaaS), it's gone as soon as you release it, obfuscated or not.
Also - keep in mind that "Legal advice" isn't necessarily "Business advice". Lawyers can't tell you how to make money, or how to build a business that survives even when people compete with you. They'll tell you how to try to prevent competition, or protect IP, but they won't tell you how to be a market leader.
As for BigCorp copying your inventions - that can obviously happen. But it's also very likely that if you can solve a problem that BigCorp is failing at, they'll simply give you an M&A offer.
I think all these problems arise from the way we pretend that information is property. It is not.
I don't think people have a problem with enforcing patents in general, just patent 'trolling', i.e. buying someone else's patent or patenting broad ideas.
edit: newline detection fail
Conversely however, I do hear about companies that have taken someone's SaaS app by dumping the front-end code, and building their own backend, and releasing it with absolutely no changes to the elements they've stolen.
This may be due to my filter bubble making it so I hear more about web apps (I write web based apps) but anecdotally it does seem that SaaS is not a protection against piracy.