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Comment by jameskilton | Hacker News Reader

"Over the course of 18 months that single Avast! Pro license was shared and used on 744,651 different machines. At the current cost of $34.95 per pro license, that’s total lost revenue in the region of $27,074,052.45."

No no no no no! You cannot prove that every single one of the illegal users would have bought the software legally had they not found the key. This is the same confounding logic the RIAA/MPAA keeps trying to use and it's still wrong.

Anyway, it is an interesting little statistic though I have to wonder if they can actually litigate anymore given they let this go on for 18 months. It is really illegal anymore?

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Later in the article:

"You can’t count all those users taking advantage of the license as lost revenue, like the music industry does with song downloads. The Avast! Pro license was there to be used, so people used it. If it hadn’t been on P2P sites then the vast majority of users would have gone elsewhere for protection."

Right, but with free alternatives available such as the fantastic Microsoft Security Essentials, so you can't say that the industry lost $X in sales because of the license.

That's literally the next sentence.

>You don’t need to spend any money to keep your machine protected, especially if you run Windows. Microsoft offers you a firewall as part of the Windows default install now, and Microsoft Security Essentials anti-virus software is free.

It seems that that latter part is part of the Geek.com writer's commentary on the original article from PC Pro, though, so the original article likely didn't call out their own broken logic.

I resold Avast through my small consultancy for a few years, and I don't think they're the type of company that would actually litigate against their users. Their free product is very good. The compelling reasons to go pro matter most to businesses, who are usually happy to pay for a license/support anyway.

I am somewhat disappointed that they withheld the single most interesting statistic to come out of the whole experiment. The debate over what percentage of pirates would actually buy the software they pirate is a long standing open argument in the industry. This would have been a rare datapoint. Something tells me that "the industry" doesn't want those stats out in the open.

That was pointed out later in the article.

Even so, the actual number is still interesting, because if a few percent converts, it's real money.

With 750k users, you could use A/B testing like Wikipedia did to find what prompts result in the most conversions. Wikipedia managed a 1.84% donation rate with an average of $26. If you could get that same conversion rate on $35 sales, you'd get $483k.

I got the distinct impression that the number was being given as a somewhat joking reference to the RIAA logic. I doubt the entire company has a gross revenue anywhere close to that number.

Granted only a fraction would have paid. This is a tracked, measured accounting. I'm pretty sure that the RIAA/MPAA just make numbers up wholesale.

>>You cannot prove that every single one of the illegal users would have bought the software legally had they not found the key.

No, but you can prove that they used $x of your service and charge them for it. It's what they actually used not what they might have used had things been different.

The key would be whether the tax office accepts the loss as genuine.

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