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Comment by smackfu | Hacker News Reader

"Apple. Just figured out a way. To stop. Software piracy."

Counterpoint: Now pirates just need to break one DRM system, and you as developer have no way of fighting back.

Counter-counter point: We will make buying legit software so easy only broke college kids will bother pirating.

I don't think people pirate software because it's hard to pay for it and install it. I think they pirate it because they don't want to pay for it. Ninety-nine cent songs are one thing; $99 apps are something else entirely.

At least with games, I've seen a lot of buzz about Steam (the games-only predecessor to Apple's App Store) fighting piracy just by virtue of being easier (especially for agoraphobic/shut-in gamers) than going to the store, working better than vendor-specific online stores, less terrible than disc-based DRM, and less onerous than the hassle of piracy and cracking.

Yes, this is the weakest point in the article. There is no piracy on non-jailbroken iPhones because there is no way to run arbitrary code. There happens to be rampant piracy on jailbroken phones because they are able to run modified (cracked) AppStore applications. The AppStore on Mac OS X will be no different from a jailbroken phone.

People have broken the DRM system from Apple in the past, (Fairplay), and Apple keeps fixing it.

Why bother breaking the DRM on their media? There's plenty of other sources for almost everything (save the rare iTunes exclusives) on there, so there's virtually no reason to bother. If the app store is the only place to get these apps, you can be sure pirates will work on cracking that DRM.

Why bother breaking the DRM on their media?

Because it is there. People do it in part for the challenge, and in part to send a message along the lines of "you can't stop us this way".

True, I should rephrase what I meant there: there is less motivation, other than the sheer challenge, to break their media DRM. With the possibility that apps will be only available through the store, there is some economic/first release motivation as well, so I'd expect the DRM breaking on that to be more agressive.

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