Piracy Doubled My App Sales
amitay.us
amitay.us
Way back in the day, I co-wrote an early networked multiplayer game on the Mac, Spectre. We didn't use copy protection, as it was too much hassle for legitimate users. However, there was a nontrivial-to-hack requirement that you have N serial numbers for an N-player game. This led to people pirating the game for the single-player mode, enjoying it, and buying a second or third copy for multiplayer. I don't have hard data, but we believe a lot of our sales originated this way.
There's probably some psychology at work here: if you let someone download a "trial version" for free, they may not value it as much as an app they had to "pirate".
My only involvement in the iOS port was to give it my blessing, after the fact. The author got in touch with us (the original Spectre authors) at some point when he was pretty far along in development, asking us about a license, which we gave him for free -- we were happy to see Spectre live on.
The same might be true for game consoles, but probably not for PCs.
I was never made to feel guilty about borrowing those books from the city library, returning them two weeks later and never buying them. When did the standard change?
It will be very interesting to see how they handle ebooks. I'd be surprised if the publishers didn't enforce scarcity.
Bootnote: We did buy the game following this!
When real pirates steal real goods, their owner doesn't have them anymore, and can't benefit from them anymore. They don't double their sales, because there's fewer things left to sell. Software isn't like that: you just make another copy for the next paying user. This is true whether your software is proprietary or free.
Comparing people who share your software with others to pirates means you are criminalizing the folks who are doing your marketing for you.
You can argue about the economic effects, but at least stop using misleading terms -- it does not help anyone understand anything.
Whether or not you agree with the legality of it is irrelevant, the fact is that it's illegal for you to make copies of software that you are not authorized to copy.
Ethically, it's not fair to the people who build these apps to be deprived of the revenue they would earn from your usage of it.
They don't have a right to your money, but then, you don't have a right to their software either.
...but the claim of the gp was that it is not "theft" as such. Copying something from someone and taking something away from someone are not the same.
Drawing a definitional distinction there helps us to have a meaningful debate about the moral, ethical, and legal dimensions; the only benefit to muddying the distinction is as a rhetorical tactic to confuse the issues.
What really ticks me off about thieves is how they try to quibble over definitions as though that changed the consequences. Making an unauthorised copy of something that is supplied for money IS theft.
Consider this quote from Landes and Posner -- one of the primary orthodox authorities on the matter:
"Copyright protection -- the right of the copyright's owner to prevent others from making copies -- trades off the costs of limiting access to a work against the benefits of providing incentives to create the work in the first place. Striking the correct balance between access and incentives is the central problem in copyright law."
Is that how physical goods, and theft, are understood? No. To say there is a tradeoff is to say both are good: that is, copying is good.
Read it: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/IPCoop/89land1.html -- and learn something.
Coming up with a new name that's not theft is probably a good idea, then we can mete the appropriate opprobrium upon that word instead of the too much of theft and the not enough of copyright infringement. This is definitely a goldilocks issue.
I don't think it has anything to do with theft, it has to do with painting piracy in a bad light.
By overloading it, you get past connotations of the old word
The fact the metaphor doesn't line up perfectly is a problem, but it is the closest word I can think of that most people would understand.
I mean, by what you're saying, you can call killing a pig for meat murder as that's what we kill it what Damer did it.
I'm contending we should have two words similar to how for killing we have "Slaughter" (Implies animals and farming for food), and "Murder" (Implies purposeful taking of a human life except for certain animal rights/vegan groups trying to use the overloaded meaning).
Perhaps "Fringing"? "Freeping"? "Warezing"? etc.
That doesn't make any sense. You can't deprive someone of revenue, because (at least given a few assumptions of non-totalitarianism) nothing guarantees that a thing will produce revenue. Owners don't have a "right" to revenue, especially in a capitalist economy.
> ...just as much as deciding to occupy a seat on a train without paying is depriving the train operator of revenue and is theft, claiming that the seat is unused or that you doing marketing is bogus
No, the problem with taking an unused seat on a train is not that you are "depriving the train operator of revenue." The problem is that the seat is a physical good, and once you take it, the train operator no longer has it. You have taken the seat from them (not the "potential revenue") -- and thus prevented them from selling it to a paying customer, or doing whatever else they wanted to do with it.
To see this more clearly, note that it would be wrong for you to take a physical good from someone regardless of whether they planned to sell it or not. The moral problem with theft does not lie in depriving someone of revenue.
Software isn't like that. By obtaining a copy of a program, you're not taking anything from anyone in a way that prevents them from using it. In particular, if the software has an "owner," you're not preventing them from selling it.
Piracy isn't theft. It's counterfeiting, which us much worse for the product creator. As an example, theft may deprive LG of a physical television, which isn't that bad. Counterfeiting can destroy the actual value of the product being passed out for free. Software, like any digital good for sale, is almost like proprietary currency. It's value is only in the minds of the consumers, because there isn't any physical cost involved. If it gets shared and anyone can get access to it through Google, torrent sites, etc, this value approaches $0 (and will eventually be $0).
We probably shouldn't be using terms like theft anymore, but counterfeiting. However, I have a feeling that those words will still be used because many people still want to justify piracy and want to make it seem like it's not really a bad thing.
Identity theft is not "theft" and we still call it that. A person's data is merely copied (the original is still there).
By this definition, "brand-name" shrinkwrap software that you bought cheaply in SE Asia that has suspiciously poorly-reproduced covers and instructions might be counterfeit (because the purchaser might be misled into thinking they're getting an official edition), but most p2p piracy is not (because there's no discrepancy between what the recipient gets and what they think they're getting).
I feel that the only reason you don't like any of these words is because you don't want copyright infringement painted in a bad light. It's a bad thing and it does cause software developers to eventually lose business, the words we use to describe it aren't going to change that.
No, I'm just pedantic. I don't do copyright infringement; as a developer, depending on copyright for my living, I hold that it would be immoral.
If I copy your term paper and pass it in before you do, you still have your term paper right?
If you work and I don't pay you, you still have whatever you had before Right?
As an example, imagine if you are planning on purchasing a copy of Photoshop at $1000 but before you leave to go to the store you do a quick search on your favorite torrent site. Sure enough it's there and you download it, saving yourself $1000 while still benefiting from the use of the software and using the $1000 on something else.
So while software piracy might not harm the developer directly, it greatly benefits the person who downloads the software.
While the semantics of "is it theft" does have a slight relevance, the overhead of how this concept completely derails the legitimate debate is far worse. Theft or not, it's an issue that needs to be addressed, and the "it's not theft" folks always seem to want to avoid addressing it.
A bit like how those folks who always say "but information wants to be free / you can't stop it" never want to divulge their bank account details and passwords...
I am just speculating, but I don't see any evidence of causation one way or the other.
I think a more effective way to do this would be to make the app free for limited periods. You'll reach a much broader audience, with the same effects.
Flurry tells me the number of [new jailbreak users], which lines up almost perfectly with: [new users] - [new sales].
Jailbreak user != pirate.
Jailbreaking occurs for dozens of non-pirate reasons, most commonly to allow tethering, or the installation of apps that apple does not like, or to allow the user to use a non-approved network (such as T-Mo in the US).
Also, does flurry now disambiguate multiple devices on the same account? I know I have 6 or 7 devices on my account [I too write apps for a living] alone...but I'm sure I only count as one sale. Seems like those people would also show up as pirates by your metrics.
Unless your software product has something similar (and is also priced low, and is also installed via something like an app store: and hence is one-click away), I don't think piracy will help you much. At least it does not to the s/w authors who claim a persistent 30-80% drop in sales the day the crack comes out.
People using an app are people using an app no matter how they acquired it.
potential support costs. So it matters if they paid for the app or not.
You could argue that they also decrease exposure by not counting as a download & dollar earned in the app store, but first you'd have to prove that all pirates would buy have purchased the app if not available for free, which I think many people agree is patently false.
I mean, maybe we should change that rule or something so people stop breaking it.
I had a non-appstore Mac app pirated and after a known "scene group" released a keygen and the app started to appear on known sites the sales actually increased. (Though it was nowhere near a 200% increase.)