Hacker News Reader

Comment by dissident | Hacker News Reader

> the amount of people that pirate because of DRM is tiny

This depends on the DRM and the software. Software which has high international demand but is region-locked to specific countries will be pirated because of the DRM at rates that sometimes dwarf "freeloading" pirates.

I agree that Gabe is pretty much just pandering, but in the end, DRM doesn't really help piracy rates. Maybe for an immediate period after release, which is desirable in some circumstances as a matter of convenience, but that's it.

The real question is whether the piracy rate is indicative of the loss of sales due to piracy, which is clearly contested in some situations. Would Mojang profit more if Minecraft piracy was -- hypothetically speaking -- impossible? Probably a little bit, but a lot of users will look for something else to pirate, not roll their eyes and say "ugh well I guess I have to buy it now".

View on HN

Many Minecraft license holders started out as Minecraft pirates. It's somewhat common to "try before buy" via piracy and I don't know if I am really opposed to it -- yes, it opens the door to freeloaders, but even in the case of freeloaders you generally get at least free word-of-mouth publicity out of it. Digital piracy comes at no real cost to anyone; you're not taking stock out of the hands of one who bought it wholesale, you're not removing the copy of one who purchased retail, you're not even using the developer's bandwidth. The only adverse effect comes on the pysches of the money-minded MBAs that falsely correlate each download with a lost sale when in fact many are convenience downloads from persons already entitled to a copy of the software or pre-purchase "trials". This is not true in every case, of course, but it is true in many cases.

> but it is true in many cases.

I suspect it's true in the NH bubble, but I strongly suspect that very few pirates then go on to buy the product.

When I've wanted to give some money to the author of a book I've downloaded it's really easy; I just go to a store (or Amazon, where buying stuff is really easy) and buy any book from that author on the same publisher. But for digital stuff it's often harder, with annoying websites, weird cart checkout systems, a stupid bit of credit card security theatre thrown in, some spammy email checkboxes to remember to click (or not click), etc. And this is when you want to buy it - that's too much friction for most pirates.

I'd love to see some decent research.

> I suspect it's true in the NH bubble, but I strongly suspect that very few pirates then go on to buy the product.

I think that in other conditions where pirates never go on to buy something they've pirated (gawd, "pirate" is such an awful term for this -- there are no eyepatches and cutlasses involved), they just wouldn't fucking buy it in the first place if they couldn't pirate it.

> But for digital stuff it's often harder, with annoying websites, weird cart checkout systems, a stupid bit of credit card security theatre thrown in, some spammy email checkboxes to remember to click (or not click), etc. And this is when you want to buy it - that's too much friction for most pirates.

That's a bad business model, and in no way contradicts the notion that people who pirate would like to buy later a lot of the time. Reduce the friction in the purchase process, and you'll make more money. It's almost tautological. Keeping the hurdles to purchase high then blaming the results on piracy is completely asinine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com