Research Suggests That Software Piracy Lowers Poverty
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
> Delphi 5 Professional. [...] is $540 (retail $799).
http://www.tpcug.org/newsletter/nl_2000/may2000/delphi.htm
Now your salary is $100 (at best!) and... you have something like $500000 worth of software on that $3 CD with a black and white photocopied cover.
Many doesn't even know what there were the times when you needed to pay for the tools what are now available absolutely free.
Today it would be absurd but then it was a big deal for us.
In any case, software piracy seems to be a thing of the past, except a few notable pieces of desktop software (Windows, Office, some Adobe software). Everything else moved to the web, for better or worse, where piracy is practically non-existent.
ADDED: Not sure the objections to this statement. If I needed to work on Word files, I'd almost certainly use LibreOffice rather than a 2007 vintage copy of Word. Certainly the open source software isn't always as good as the proprietary software but it's often a better choice than doing without or using versions long out of support.
Bad new days: go to a poor country, plant your flag on their intellectual property, demand tribute and export it back home
Wait, aren't the content companies offering things they made outside the new market? Or are they somehow locking up the poor country's content producers?
I think there might have been a case for intellectual property many years ago when the cost of entry was extremely high. To write a book and get it published required a big amount of effort to get it to the finish line. It would therefore make sense to have extra protections.
But now a days? Anything that can be digitalized can be distributed instantly and massively at an extremely marginal cost. But whereas in the past it was relatively easy to catch and punish someone that had broken intellectual property laws and was making any kind of real money with that... Now a days it becomes a much more difficult task, because obviously to track down everyone that is committing piracy is incredibly difficult and expensive. Yet companies are using our legal systems to do exactly that. The amount of money and time that is spent in court every year in patent related issues is astounding.
We also have to consider who the owners of intellectual property are and therefore who is benefiting the most out of the system. And curiously (well, not really) most patents are owned by big transnational businesses. Why is this the case? Well, because when a patent is useful and is owned by a small company it is very much posible for a big corporation to acquire this patent either through directly buying it or through buying the smaller company. This is common practice. Not only that but these big corporations have the resources (legal and monetary) to release similar enough products that will overflow the market anyway. An example of this is Amazon through their Amazon basics line.
In terms of creative effort, I think it is worth to look at tiktok and how people will make use of copyrighted material to produce thousands, if not millions, of these small videos that bring entertainment to so many people. This is possible through the fair use act which in reality is a form of intellectual property waiver. But this can easily be turned to its head when the ride of virality ends. Just look at YouTube and how most small creators are being sued for using copyrighted material in ways that in many cases are unfair. But what can they do about it? It's not possible for a small YouTuber to go head to head against a company the size of Nintendo (known to be "patent trolls").
I think in many ways the intellectual property system has stopped serving small creators and innovators and instead is used as a legal recourse to precisely uphold oligopolies and slow down innovation.
Piracy is actually a hell of a moat. It provides mindshare, ecosystem, network effects.
Let's hear it from the horse's mouth: Speaking at University of Washington in 1998, Bill Gates said: "Although 3 million computers get sold each year in China, people don't pay for our software. Someday they will, though, and as long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours."
And I'm currently writing this from a windows 10 OS that I never bothered to pay for and activate. It's been 2 years. I can't change the wallpaper, though. This is how much Microsoft cares.
No such issue with either of my laptops tho, which both have Intel video hardware (therefore just worked with the default open source drivers by default).
I love Gimp and cant spend 2 seconds in Photoshop before flipping a table from frustration.
PS: I like gnu ed too :)
If anybody is wondering what we're on about, please learn how to draw a circle in GIMP. Maybe finish your beverage before reading.
If you're up for it, try to discover the technique without the walkthrough. I didn't give up until about 20 minutes in. I'd like to know if somebody happens on a solution in finite time (without writing a python extension please).
Step 2. Paint outline with paint tool of choice.
"but, but ... it's a two step process" I hear you crying out with despair.
Fine. Use a shapes plugin.
Lay off the cool-aid, this shouldn't be a plugin, it should be a default feature.
I don't disagree that one click is better than two, and yes I also don't know why the GIMP developers are so resistant to providing a basic "shapes" tool, but at the same time, clicking an extra button to paint the outline of a shaped selection is not super complicated either, and if what you got from the above was "carefully run your mouse along the outline", I don't think you'd do much better in Photoshop either.
As for repeating a basic shape a bunch of times, what I typically do is create the first in a couple of clicks as above, and then copy paste or save it as a layer and duplicate away. Again, not the super complicated "you have to manually draw multiple outlines with your mouse" horror story you're trying to make it sound like...
if you want a torus/donut/circle outline instead, use circle select then right click>selection>border
thats it
They probably wanted us to get hooked too.
Eventually we'll pay with a 30% tax on all software and online commercial activity one attestation makes government and financial services unavailable to those who don't want a computer owned by google/apple/microsoft in their hluse and pocket..
Piracy is a service problem. -Gabe newell
There are those that will pirate either way, so no matter what you do they wont be your customer. And there are those that pirate because they cant afford it, which you cant really influence either. And lastly those that do for convenience, which leads into the service argument.
People no longer pirate music because Spotify is more convenient. Those who still do are archivists (data hoarders) and nothing will stop them.
Netflix used to be like that.
Same as China and India now. There's no other way to catch up.
From an economic standpoint, rich business owners want there to be more wealthy consumers in the world, because that means more customers. You don't see Whole Foods expanding to as many poor neighborhoods as rich ones, because there isn't enough money there to buy.
From a social and cultural standpoint, rich people with expensive tastes prefer to spend their time in upscale environments. They aren't happy that so many places are impoverished.
Source: I know a lot of rich people.
There isn't a conspiracy to keep people poor, it's simply a reality derived from market mechanics applied to labour.
If people in South East Asian countries were paid the same wages people in Europe are paid to do the same tasks (though, to be fair, few people in Europe do these tasks precisely because of it) then everything would be outrageously expensive.
From a social and economic stand point, rich people like to spend their time in upscale environments where the most onerous jobs are done by underpaid workers. Let's be honest, how much money would you charge to be cleaning toilets? You might think this is a job anyone can do, but in reality, it is a job most people really, really don't want to do. They don't want to do it so badly they will spend their wholes lives using every ounce of privilege they have to avoid being put in such a situation.
Our whole economic system is built on top of this idea that some people are so poor they will do anything for a little bit of money.
Source: I live in the real world.
(And other effects: There will be increased demand for technological alternatives to hiring toilet cleaners and innovation in that area, for example. Or alternatives to toilets might become more popular. Etc.)
You are correct, things will become more expensive. But so what? It doesn't really matter, because everyone in this hypothetical society is wealthier. For example, the price of hiring a janitor in San Francisco is outrageously expensive compared to hiring someone to clean in, say, a poor township in South Africa. But the people in SF are wealthier, so it doesn't matter.
And the janitors are wealthier, too: They make $40k/year in SF, $4.5k/year in Cape Town. Similarly, the average janitor in SF possesses much more wealth not only than their counterpart in South Africa, but also more than almost anyone living 100 years ago. Because society has created more wealth.
Your model of how things work is subtly based on the fixed pie fallacy, which assumes that total wealth cannot increase, and that if there are gains in one area, there must be tradeoffs elsewhere. Which is not true.
Rich people don't have strong incentives to keep poor people poor.
The whole "humanity is way more wealthy than in the 1600s because consumerism is at an all time high" thing doesn't make sense after basic inspection of the idea. In the year 2150 there will be impoverished single mothers who are working three jobs to pay off the loans for their spaceship. Just because they have a personal spaceship and they get to do hard labor in the laser mines doesn't mean they aren't permanently trapped at the very bottom of a rigid and oppressive class structure.
From a high level, self-reported happiness has an extremely strong correlation with a country's GDP. On a personal level, the average impoverished person in a developing country like South Africa has a much worse lived experience than the average impoverished person in America. You would be hard pressed to find a San Francisco janitor who wants to switch places with a Capetonian one, or a 2150 single mother who wants to switch places with an 1850 single mother.
It's not just consumerism that's at an all time high. It's wealth. It's technology. It's ease of life. It's leisure time. It's healthcare. It's the ability to communicate with others. These things don't just come out of nowhere. They're created (by capitalistic markets) because people like them and they improve their lives.
Describing it in what you call "relative terms" describes the unjust exploitation, the shackles that chain people while pretending to free them. The shackles that prevent all this progress from actually allowing people to work less (examine this: did "leisure time" actually continue to increase after the industrial revolution took us out of farming? or did it level off everywhere except for outliers like germany and france?)
Also, the Soviet Union was also chock full of starving people, and had trouble keeping grocery store shelves stocked and determining how many screws to send to factories, because they weren't allowing markets to determine prices based on supply and demand, and instead tried to control that from the top down It's not efficient and it doesn't last. Where is the Soviet Union now?
And there's more to progress than just working less. I'd rather work 40 hours/week at an air conditioned desk doing knowledge work than 40 hours inhaling coal or working in a dangerous factory. And I like that I don't have to spend 20 hours a week cleaning, washing, repairing, etc., due to a lack of efficient tools and technology and industries to help with that kind of stuff. If there hasn't been meaningful progress, then exactly what era would you like to go back to and live in?
Things are better. Let me make that clear.
But it is also very easy to dismiss inequality that does exist. Society has created more wealth and a significant part of it has gone to developing nations but reality is that most of that wealth has concentrated and continues to concentrate in developed nations. There is always a push for more equality, it used to be the case that only rich people could live to old age and now a lot more people can do that. It used to be the case that only rich people could read and now 85% of the world can read.
But... take a look at the things you interact with in a daily basis and trace back the labour that was put in them. Remember the scandal about apple using child labour to build iPhones 10 or so years ago? And what's the situation now. How much of our goods come from extremely underpaid people. Yes the cost of living is less but thats not all, living conditions in those countries are much worse than our developed nations, working conditions are awful. Society has created more wealth that's for sure, but we (in developed nations) could be a little less comfortable and trade some of that for a more equitable distribution of power and money.
But in reality. We don't do that, not even in our nations... Well not in the USA anyway. If you look at statistics about different racial groups in America there is a clear division on who is doing which jobs.
I guess maybe I ought to rephrase things a little bit. It's not that rich people want to keep poor people poor it's that they want to keep them significantly less wealthy than they are. Like it or not, no one wants to do janitorial work, and we don't want to pay janitors a lot of money. Why? Because our society is structured in such a way where what we value the most is kind of hyper intellectual specialised labour that not many people can do. I.e. we value rarity more than we value onerousness. And that's a choice. Europeans are much more equitable in that regard, and for sure a lot of their engineers end up working in the USA. But overall their society seems to be much more comfortable for the median family. These are choices we make as societies.
Also, doesnt California have some of the highest percentages of homelessness in the USA anyway? Though this is a multi faceted problem, a big thing is that those 40k that the janitor might earn is still not enough to live comfortably in such a city with such huge disparity of incomes.
For every engineer that lives their regular life, there are probably hundreds of people that are required to sustain that mode of life. But does the engineer produce enough value to offset that? I don't think so, for one, we ought to think of the climate change impact of living such lives.
I think I can summarise my position as this: although we have progressed a lot and we are capable of producing a lot of very specialised wealth. This comes at a societal and natural cost that we can't really afford. Just because we can doesn't mean we should, I believe we ought to scale down and have everyone be lifted more equitable. Everyone wants everyone to be rich, but that's not possible considering the cost of "being rich" in modern times. And the decision we've made is instead of lowering the bar of what it means to be rich we have a big spread where some people at the top are extremely wealthy (and this goes for entire countries) and the others on the bottom are not. We are progressing, yes, but some of us have progressed incredibly faster than others. And I will say, we have done so at their expense in most cases.
You said, "And the decision we've made is… we have a big spread where some people at the top are extremely wealthy… and the others on the bottom are not." To me that seems like you're implying the latter is a result of the former, that the rise of rich people/countries is what forces others into poverty. That's the fixed pie fallacy, and it's not actually true. (However, perhaps that's not what you're saying, and I'm misinterpreting.)
It's true that some people and places are progressing faster and further than others, but progress is progress. So many of the factor jobs we consider crappy, for example, are huge improvements over the previously available jobs in those places. I do agree there is something distasteful and of course unfair about the disparities in wealth, living conditions, and working conditions, and more can and should be done to help the less fortunate on earth.
But I don't think agree that the way to do that is to scale down. To my mind, the chief benefactor of people worldwide is technology: printing, reading, electronics, cheap crops, democracy, healthcare advancements, etc. Technological innovations have ended millennia of stagnation when it comes to human suffering (e.g. famine), lifted billions out of poverty, and improved human happiness. And those innovations are chiefly the result of economic systems that create competitive markets that incentivize innovation. The resulting inequality is a small price to pay, to my mind.
Here's perhaps a better way to look at it: Anyone accepting money is a business, anyone paying money is a customer. If I "hire" you as your "employer" and give you a "salary" to be my "employee" and do your "job," the reality is you're the business and I"m the customer. Employer really means customer, employee really means business, hire really means buy, salary really means price, and job really means product/service.
And just like every customer/business relationship, the business wants to charge more, the customer wants to pay less, and neither party is much concerned with the downstream effects on the economy. Everyone just wants to save.
As larger picture, rising the minimum wage might not be worse thing as almost all of it will go to consumption thus increased demand. Business in developed countries make more money because their consumers can pay more.
It should be self-evident, like asking if free schooling improves education.
Althoguht we did have a debate a few months ago here, some people disagreed that building homes lowers homelessness
It also reminds me of how many developers were able to pick up enough photoshop to be dangerous and better connect with designers.
There’s lots of alternatives to photoshop today anyways :)
Having access to learning how to use knowledge in your life (like photoshop skills) is invaluable to uplift yourself and future generations.
I've never bought Windows, when I was younger I used the pirated versions and later got a licence for free due to being a student and Microsoft having a deal with the university.
If I weren't able to pirate it, I would have to use Linux and thus would probably never switch to Windows.
That being said, while I still use Windows, the majority of my devices are Linux now. But the main stationary computer is still Windows.
Do you believe all the other places you get information from are unbiased? They aren't, every human being is biased, we're wholly incapable of being truly objective. The best you can hope for are sources who are open and honest about their biases. It's the ones claiming to be "fair and balanced" that you need to watch out for.
No conflict = no interest
What other organization would talk about the topic interesting to that organization?
And even when it comes to paid research, why pretend like someone else was ever going to do the research? “Woah smoking gun guys! The only organization ever interested in this funded a paper!” Yeah sure so put that observation in your back pocket for how much weight you put into it and move on