My Software Is Being Pirated | Hacker News Reader

My Software Is Being Pirated

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53 pointslehmannro121 comments

"Charge a fair price for it." seems to be a meaningless platitude in this instance, sort of a soup-bone to the "I'm only pirating because it is overpriced" apologetics. Isn't the whole point of the anecdote that World of Goo is, umm, more than fairly priced? (Seriously, people are pirating a $20 pass to pure gaming joy which requires a machine minimally ten times as expensive to run. Probably a hundred times for many of the pirates, since they are gaming enthusiasts.)

Want a recipe for being pirated less? Make something that people wouldn't want to get for free. crickets chirp Actually, that probably won't even help -- I think a large portion of piracy is essentially pathological. Bingo Card Creator -- an which assists primary school English teachers who are, on average, not likely to be reading Chinese pirate forums -- got spikes of 10k+ downloads when the new cracks were released.

It even had a description translated into Chinese... which was hilarious. (My brother translated for me: "Apparently it's like a gambling game for English or some shit.")

Honestly its like putting a shiny object in front of that bird with the unhealthy fascination for shiny objects whose name I am forgetting at the moment. If your code compiles, it will be pirated. You could make a Windows forms calculator with only a plus button, with an equals sign available with a CD Key, and people would pirate that. (I've often thought of trying it.)

>You could make a Windows forms calculator with only a plus button, with an equals sign available with a CD Key, and people would pirate that. (I've often thought of trying it.)

Made me think of this:

http://blort.org/~kgasso/images/how-to-catch-script-kiddies....

Magpie

What about a hardware token? Are those effective?

No, because the software title itself is still software, dongle or not; the exact same techniques crack dongle titles as crack downloadable shareware. Which is why very few titles use dongles.

I see this argument a lot, "Oh well, it's cheap, so people should just pay for it!" and it seems to gloss over one important fact.

Money is not an unlimited resource.

If there are say.. $4,000 (purchase price) of fun and awesome things released in a year, and the average person after things like bills, rent/mortgage, etcetera only has say.. $500 left to actually spend on frivolity, then they might decide the following:

"Well, I guess I will download the rest. It's not like they are losing a sale. I don't HAVE any money, anyway!".

And, if this is the case, it's true. No-one actually LOSES anything. You can't lose a sale you could never have made anyway.

So such numbers can be shockingly misleading.

I would agree with your opinion if a vast majority of people who have computers and Internet connections could not afford another $20. But what if there was no pirated version of this game available? I think you'd find that, if it's not too inconvenient, more people would actually buy the game.

For example, console games don't suffer as much from pirating, but what if hypothetically it was as easy to pirate a game for your Wii or 360 as it was for your PC? I very much doubt that people would continue to buy the games.

So basically, the very presence of pirated games available for free is taking sales away from the game makers, people are simply choosing the free option.

You seem to be overlooking the scarceness issue. It's not about Just Another $20. It's about Just Another $20, And Another. And Another.

You are saying that it would be wrong for me to download something, even if the very act of doing so does not make anyone lose any money, take the food from anyone's mouth (etc etc)?

I think that misses the point.

Suppose someone is selling clay pottery. They bought a machine to help them make it, but the clay itself is freely available. They just go down to the riverbed and grab a heap of clay. You could go get the very same clay. It's free; it's a public resource. We'll even say there is infinite clay.

Now then. The producer is using a totally free resource to produce clay pots. It takes a few hours to make each one, and they are very nice. But the only material in the product is a free resource. If you were to steal the pots without paying for them, the producer isn't out anything, because the producer can just go get more clay; no big deal. You've taken no money, you've taken no food. All you've taken is a clay pot, made out of a substance of which the producer has an infinite supply.

Is it okay to steal the pot?

his time, effort, and skill DO have a value, so no.

What are you saying? The creators of games don't have a value? Ok then, let them know that so they can all stop producing them. It's a terrible shame to have so many people devoted to something that creates no value for anyone.

That's exactly what I was trying to get across. I thought an analogy might help, albeit an imperfect one.

To replicate a computer game is trivial, but when buying a computer game, one is not so much paying for the replicated copy of the software as one is paying for the time and expenses that went into producing it in the first place.

A lot of people do give software away for free, but that's their choice.

I have to be clear that I do not use unlicensed software. I also think that people should not use the software, if they can't afford it.

But I don't agree that all pirated copies are lost sales. Some of them might be of course, but you can't expect that each copy is a lost sale.

Let's use MS Office as an example. Here there is a free alternative (Open Office) that does most of what normal users needs. But the piracy level is very high. This is (originally) a product made for businesses, that most home users certainly don't need. You don't think that most homes would spend $399 on MS Office if MS made it more difficult to copy?

The reason why schools expects reports to be delivered as Word-documents is because it is implied that parents will have a copy of MS Office. This can only work because software can be pirated. If the parents had to spend $399, all schools would accept ODF documents, because there is usually at least one person connected to the school who knows that a free alternative is available.

BTW: "Piracy" is a word that the companies used (probably advised by a PR company), so that it will seem worse. It has worked out very well for them, even the "pirates" use that word. Perhaps I should use a similar strategy against the things I dislike... I will from this day forward interpret DRM as "Digital Rape Model" :-) Copying software is not stealing. It is not legal or (in most cases) ethical, it is it's own form of crime. It may be difficult to define, but calling it "stealing" is not right,

You might as well say that I will steal a potential sale, if I write a false negative fact about a product. It is wrong, but I doubt you can call it stealing.

Yea, I got what you meant and thought it was pretty obvious personally.

What some of these guys don't seem to get is when you buy something physical you pay for the whole thing, production costs and all, right in one go (or if it's too expensive for that you make payments). When you buy media of most any kind you don't because few could afford to pay what it cost to produce. Instead the total cost is kind shared between lots of people. We all sort of pay a percentage. So just like in brick & morter stores: when someone starts stealing product they push price up for everyone else.

> To replicate a computer game is trivial, but when buying a computer game, one is not so much paying for the replicated copy of the software as one is paying for the time and expenses that went into producing it in the first place.

Y'know, I always thought it would be interesting to sell the first X copies of software for a $Y, where $XY is cost of expenses and time you needed to put into it, plus a Z% profit. Any additional feature requests/etc. to that particular software would be developed and sold using the same model.

As always, this kind analogy doesn't apply to digital copies. For the analogy to work each digital copy would need to be recoded from scratch by the original developer.

No. Because the producer isn't, once he's made his Clay Pot 1.0, simply using a replicator to run off infinite copies of it.

But if he WAS, then yeah, it'd be fine, providing you had no way to getting the pots yourself.

Yes, believe it or not, that seems to be what he's saying: that if someone demands $20 for something that costs them $0 marginally to provide you, it is in fact still wrong for you to take it without paying $20.

Even if you don't have $20? And it costs them EXACTLY $0 to provide you?

"And it costs them EXACTLY $0 to provide you?"

Stupid question. What kind of game have you ever downloaded that cost the developers EXACTLY $0 in time and effort to provide that game?

You probably meant "$0 to them for me to download or copy the bits." But I don't see the point in ignoring the very real costs incurred by the developer in the honest hope of compensation for that labor.

I also get irritated by people (not just you, but others in this thread and legion on the internet) that consider the right to pirate software and entertainment a great human right worthy of moral outrage. I might understand someone tempted to steal health care through some sort of fraud if they can't afford it legally, or justify stealing food or shelter or some basic necessity of human life. But defending the right to steal entertainment (most of it pretty low artistic quality to begin with) is just kind of pathetic and not worth the time expended. You must feel some sort of need to justify your own moral misgivings if you're taking time out to rationalize the virtues of pirating content, when you could be spending that time more productively in finding other content to pirate.

Again, this is not aimed at you, specifically, but also all of the people on Reddit, Slashdot, and Digg who spend so much time coming up with these rationalizations. I have more respect for the people who just pirate and don't claim it as some moral crusade against the Evil RIAA and Friends.

Then don't take something until you have $20 to support them. I'm not perfect when it come to piracy but I do feel guilty enjoying something for free when I know someone put a lot of effort into it expecting compensation.

$20 is cheap too. If you can't afford $20, get a better job. Or spend the time you would have devoted to playing World of Goo teaching yourself the skills to get a better job. Again I'm not perfect but I can't justify stealing a $20 game from an independent developer. Stealing a tv show or $2000 software might be a gray area, but World of Goo deserves support.

Sorry, but this argument is a strawman. Most people who are downloading games free aren't spending all their dollars on games and then downloading the rest once they run out of money.

But is it OK for someone to benefit from something they aren't willing to pay for? What is the difference between someone who decides to go without because they don't or can't pay and someone who says I can't/won't pay so I'll just copy it from someone else? Is it morals or economics?

"But is it OK for someone to benefit from something they aren't willing to pay for? "

It happens all the time. For example, I benefited from your comment, but I wouldn't have paid to read it.

The currency on HN is karma points. I can only hope you will do the right thing ;^).

You cannot really use morals in an example where you aren't depriving anyone of anything.

The people who choose not to copy the game without paying are depriving themselves of the benefit of the game even though they don't have to vs. the people who decide its ok to play the game even though they can't or won't pay. So what is the difference between the two people? The economics is factored out (neither person pays) so the difference would seem to be one of personal morals.

I thought you were talking about depriving OTHERS. Which is what matters, is it not?

I certainly don't have all the answers to this one and I certainly can't claim sainthood when it comes to software piracy. I have copied more than my fair share of programs, but, like Jeff, this was mainly done in my younger days. Now I don't. You can argue that when I did copy things it was in my younger days when I didn't have any money and so I justified it by saying it was OK because I wasn't hurting anyone, and now I don't because I have more money and can afford it. That is the argument that Jeff makes to explain why he doesn't pirate software anymore. But I think the "now I'm older" may have more to do with it than he realizes. I could logically say that I'm not depriving someone of a sale, but emotionally I could not reconcile getting value from something without reciprocating. So in some sense I feel I would be depriving the creators of realizing the value they have created for me. For me, the moral/emotional balance sheet wouldn't add up somehow. From a pure economic standpoint there should be no reason for me to pay for something when I can get it for free. However these arguments are complicated by the fact that I am a programmer by trade so perhaps I feel more of a need to reciprocate to my own kind than I would otherwise.

Thank you for depriving me of a great deal of software that would otherwise not demand per-seat registration and kernel module license monitors. Thank you for depriving me of a great deal of software that would not cost $600 retail if it wasn't so hard to keep users from circulating it.

Nonsense. The vendors set the price to maximise the profit from those people who buy their product. This is the same whether some people pirate or not.

That's arguable, but it's not arguable that all these horribly inconvenient seat licenses, keys, DVD zone codes, etc., are a result of pirating.

Depriving how, exactly? I'm talking about non-sales. I am talking about people who literally DO NOT HAVE ANY MORE MONEY. If they download something, how can you count that as a 'lost sale' or a 'loss to piracy'?

You just can't. That's making something from nothing.

Most of the people who pirate Illustrator do not "literally have no money". They simply choose not to spend it on Illustrator. So they take it, and let people like me pay extra to make up for it.

Or maybe these people don't have the $600 for it either.

And maybe the small fraction of people who literally don't have $600 should spend $30 on Lineform, or help out with Inkscape, instead of just taking the $600 piece of software and pretending that the rest of the market doesn't exist.

I think his point is that the software probably wouldn't cost $600 if they weren't figuring in theft. Things in retail brick & morter stores also cost more due to "shrinkage".

Stealing has a price whether we chose to "logic" it away or not. Think of it this way: if everyone just did as you suggested and took all games for free, wouldn't most companies just stop producing games?

Stealing does NOT always have a price. And using shrinkage is a fallacious argument. Physical goods in store have an actual production cost. What's the cost of dragging and dropping a file to make a copy of it?

A few cents for your time, maybe fifty cents to a dollar for storage costs? It's not equivalent to a an actual physical good which could have a material cost of anywhere from a few cents, to hundreds (thousands) of dollars.

Of course it does. Shrinkage isn't fallacious, companies look at how much they lost to theft and adjust their prices accordingly.

What do you think companies do when they see that their product has an 82% piracy rate? They think "we only made 18% of what we should have on this!!!". What they do after that depends on a lot of things, but some people stop making things, some jack up the price to their real customers and some implement ridiculous things like DRM that even terrorize their customers. But all these things have a price and most of us pay it one way or another.

This is rubbish. Companies set their prices to maximise their returns. If they could make more money out of you by raising their prices they would, piracy or not.

Nobody is saying companies would lower their prices just to be nice; they're saying that if the market for a piece of software was broader, because it included the people pirating it, prices would come down naturally as the vendor addressed the market to maximize their return.

As it stands, there is no point to making Photoshop cheaper, because even if it cost $200 instead of $500, a huge portion of home users would still just steal it.

Sure, companies are in business to make money. But do you truly believe that piracy has no cost? It should be an extremely simple logical exercise to prove it does: just imagine if everyone always did it in every situation.

I don't think it causes an increase in the price of goods, although I don't doubt that an increase in piracy leads to a decreasing number of products being developed.

You don't see how it could increase the price? Think about all the money (e.g. developer/researcher time) being spent on trying to stop piracy. These are costs that are passed directly onto the customers.

That's complete nonsense. A software company will always choose the price they believe will generate the most revenue.

If they are acting rationally they would choose exactly the same price regardless of whether the software cost $100 to produce or $100 million.

You are suggesting that there is some other consideration involved, which necessarily means that the company will act against their own interests and price their software irrationally.

If 3x as many people will buy your product at 1/2 the price, it's rational to cut your price in half. However, if the 1/2 price targets a market segment 90% populated by software pirates, everyone gets to pay 2x as much, including the 10% of honest people downmarket.

So what you advocate is the ajkirwin planned economy, where things cost what ajkirwin thinks they should cost. Games: fifty cents to maybe a dollar of storage costs. Can I lobby you on prescription drugs? The marginal cost of a pill is like $0.05.

I spend money on movies and games and don't pirate software, but...

There is a finite patent of prescription drugs so over time they go to their marginal cost. Anyway, I see little advantage to extending copy write on games over 7 years. The idea that you can make money selling copy's of something who's author died 65 years ago seems stupid. Society decided to extended copy write protection to promote people making things, pretending it has value beyond that is silly.

PS: I hereby copy write every number from 1 to (12345 ^ 12345)^ 12345 converted to binary, which covers every software that is ever going to be produced until the end of time. Now pay me money.

Copyright give the copyright holder the right to prevent others from copying their ideas even if they have independent origin. Just like patents.

PS: Having already listed your above comment I clam copyright over it and insist that you delete it. (kidding.)

The last I checked we don't live in some kind of bizarre socialist society where you can have things just because you can't afford them.

No, we don't, but maybe we should. Why should somebody who can't afford software not be allowed to have it?

Why should someone who can't afford to have a house not be allowed to have it? Oh wait....

That's an interesting question too, but not really related to what I was asking and probably off-topic for this thread.

I'm serious.

If somebody has no money and wants to use some expensive commercial software, what is the cost to the copyright owner of letting them use of that software for free?

None at all? Maybe even less than that?

Now what is the benefit to that person and to society in general?

I'm sorry, but the cost of a piece of software has nothing to do with the cost of delivery of that software. The point of selling software is for a company to make money and survive. Just because there is 0 cost involved to deliver a piece of software doesn't mean that there is no value associated with a pirated license. Frankly, the cost to the company should have absolutely nothing to do with the cost the consumer pays, other than the fact that the consumer should pay more than the cost to the company.

The idea that people have that just because something costs a company a small amount or nothing to deliver somehow gives them the right to steal it is mind boggling. It doesn't matter how much it costs the company, it's none of your business. What is of import is what the company says the item costs.

Taking that for free without paying is stealing, no matter how you attempt to justify it.

Well, this is the problem. There is the cost and the perceived cost. And, right or wrong, the perceived cost ends up costing a lot of people. Usually the ones who are actually paying for the product (that useless country code thing on DVDs has got to be one of the most asinine wastes of time ever).

I don't know what the answer is. Personally if the software does what I need but is more then I can/am willing pay I seek a free alternative. If that didn't exist, I'm not sure what I would do since as far as I remember that situation hasn't happened to me yet.

What you say is true, but what percentage of people are not paying because they can't afford it vs. the one's who just don't want to pay for it?

While it is true that someone downloading a game that they couldn't have paid for doesn't deprive the maker of money, it's quite a slippery slope.

It's not even true if you can't afford it. You have $500 to spend on "frivolity" this year. You choose not to spend $20 of it on World of Goo. Now you're not going to spend the money next year, either: you already took it. You might as well not spend the $500. Give it to charity, and just take everything you want. See, now you're Robin Hood!

You don't know how many people would prioritize this game over other spending if they couldn't get it for free. Only things that you can pirate can you choose to get for free so it gets prioritized lower than it deserves.

they might have bought it next year.

Quote:

   In fact, the most effective anti-piracy software development strategy is the simplest one of all:

   1. Have a great freaking product.
   2. Charge a fair price for it.

Is he joking? The World of Goo is a great freaking product. And The World of Goo is fairly priced at $20. And yet the piracy rate is still at 82% or so. So where does Jeff base his "in fact" anti-piracy claim on?

You see, Jeff Atwood prefers talking about software to actually making software, by a long, long shot. Most of his writings are nothing more than summaries of other people's work, sometimes padded with some theorizing and sweeping generalizations of his own. His writing style may make him seem like an expert, but he isn't.

"So where does Jeff base his "in fact" anti-piracy claim on?"

I would attribute it to wishful thinking based on an assumption of human morality. The truth is that people are lazy and don't consider the morality of their actions. How else can the rampant piracy of tv shows freely available on hulu.com be explained? The commercials are very short and the quality is good. Pirates are in the habit of getting their software from bittorrent and don't even look for a legal method of obtaining the software they use.

Actually the "free" TV shoes are easily explained. Not everyone who lived in america and got addicted to these shows lives there now. You can't watch the shows on the broadcaster's web site unless you live in country, so if you live in another country that speaks a different language then you will have to either (a) wait some months to get a dubbed version, (b) wait over a year to buy the season DVD or (c) download it.

Remember that not everyone lives in the USA. Nearly everything on hulu.com is limited to US IP addresses only, because they're still wrangling with international licensing for most of the shows on there. Online video stores like iTunes and Xbox Live have anaemic-to-nonexistent lineups outside of North America.

Bittorrent, on the other hand, doesn't much care where in the world you are.

Meh, in the case of music and games, I know a lot of people who pirate as a "try before you buy" type of thing, and then shell out the cash for the product if they think it's worth it.

I do this with music (I recently dropped illegal art a sum of money equal to what I've downloaded due to Girl Talk and a few other awesome artists on that label).

I suspect this is bullshit. My guess is that this is what they tell themselves their philosophy is, but tend to "forget" or "not get around to" paying for most of the stuff they actually liked.

Do you disagree?

Yes, I do. Because I know these people, and I know that they do these things because I have watched them do them, repeatedly.

Edit: It may be bullshit in the general case (applying to people who make the claim of "try before I buy"), but it is not bullshit in the case of myself or the people that I actually know who claim that.

I don't think very many people really make excuses like this. Most (if not all) of the people I know pirate quite liberally and they do it without apologizing or feeling the need to rationalize anything.

Even though those who have their interests aligned with the current copyright regime like to loudly declare otherwise, it really seems that intuitively there is no ethical problem with piracy.

I download tv shows because I don't want to wait the 8 days that the network delays stuff from appearing online. I would gladly watch them on Hulu with commercials if it were not for this.

Something is wrong here. What is fair price? It depends from country to country. In US, USD20 may be a fair price for everyone. But, how many of the game users are actually from countries other than US?

In some developing countries, USD20 is about a day salary or 10 meals.

I guess it's the best piracy policy precisely because it totally ignores piracy.

>And yet the piracy rate is still at 82% or so.

That figure'd be a lot more useful if we knew what the usual piracy rate is.

I'd pay 5 bucks for it. The last time I sprung for a game, The Ship, it was $5.

If piracy rates haven't changed in 32 years and are still at 90% doesn't that mean piracy doesn't hurt technology?

Developers have a perverted view, they think 90% of people are stealing their product. When really 90% of people wouldn't pay to use your product to begin with.

This is when DRM comes in and the developer tries to force this 90% to pay. However, people either hack the DRM or simply don't use the product. I imagine Linux got a lot more users when Microsoft started implementing DRM and some people didn't want to fight with it.

Adobe and Microsoft prices are ridiculous, why? Because they make money off the 10%, not off hunting the 90%. Microsoft doesn't even actively target pirates, it doesn't check every time you go to send an error report, it doesn't check every time you log in. Why? Because the 90% of people are an amazing resource to hunt down problems that will make the 10% pay even more, specifically big business.

Adobe doesn't "hunt the 90%" because doing so would impose conditions so onerous on the remaining 10% that they would lose business. So instead, they jack the price of Illustrator and Photoshop up to the limit of what the 10% will pay.

Also because it increases adoption of their product. Then, when those people go to work, they say "I know and need Photoshop/Illustrator/whatever". Businesses are easier to enforce piracy with, and will pay more.

I'm bothered by Jeff's attitude that a game made by a bigger company is somehow more deserving of piracy.

An interesting psychological effect: Diffusion of responsibility, in reverse. If, in a situation where individual contribution to an act is miniscule, no one is to "blame" for making something negative, then no one is also to reward if the result is positive. If a big company creates value, no one individually created that value in any meaningful way, so the value is psychologically "ownerless."

Is this an actual effect? I feel like doing an experiment.

I wouldn't say its necessarily so, take Microsoft - its a corporation with thousands of employees that work on its products, but how many people hold Gates personally responsible for the failings of Windows?

This example is a fairly mainstream idea... it made an appearance in the South Park movie.

Blame human psychology. Jeff knows it's harder to pirate from "the little guys" so he plays on guilt. I'm sure most pirates are open to rational arguments though.

It's very simple: for bigger company piracy is more like a form of advertising, but for a small one it can actually hurt and kill the small guys.

Cory Doctorow is one of the most copyright reform-advocacy-minded people around, and he makes the opposite claim: [paraphrased] "the problem for independent artists isn't piracy, it's obscurity."

If A is the set of people that've heard of your product sans piracy, and B is the people that've heard of it after piracy, then the gap between B' that pirates and B had better be smaller than the gap between A and B. That's likelier for a tiny producer than a huge one.

I don't care, I make the claim I make:

Big guys have free advertising from piracy, small guys are hurt from the same thing.

Edit: I guess we mis-understand each other -- I didn't mean VERY small guys, who may suffer from obscurity.

The article lacks any real point--the only solid point he's making is, "if you write software and charge money for it, your software will be pirated."

He then implies some software "deserves" to be pirated, by claiming World of Goo falls outside that category (because it isn't from the "bowels" of a "faceless EA-Activision franchise sweatshop").

Many independent game developers don't view piracy as black and white. I would be interested in reading an article where someone makes a hypothesis one way or the other, and backs it up. This article isn't that.

And, for the record, the amended World of Goo piracy rate is 82%. 2D Boy mentions that in an update on the very same blog post Jeff links to, but I guess that would mean he would've had to read beyond the title to notice: http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/

I love threads like this because they show who's who.

One of the many reasons I joined hacker news was to meet like minded people for possible future collaboration. Sometimes you really get to know each other here.

AFAIC, there is no gray area in ethical matters. Right is right and wrong is wrong. If you use situational ethics to justify what is clearly wrong, you may have made an interesting argument, but you have also done one other thing: you have automatically disqualified yourself from ever doing business with me (and probably many others here, I suspect.)

A little background:

I once wrote some software that a partner installed in a remote client site for which our company got paid. Unbeknowst to me, he also installed that software at another site and kept all the money.

I bought the used car from one of my partners at an agreed upon price and found out later that he had disconnected the speedometer for as many as 50,000 miles.

Another partner of mine had a side business selling hardware and negotiated a backroom deal with our customer that jeapordized our major project.

One IT director where I worked had software salesmen leave their documentation for "project review", photocopied it, and used it for our own functional specs, with no intention of ever buying anything.

Starting to get the idea of how "you wouldn't have made any money anyway" easily morphs into "fuck you"?

And as far as software pirating goes, I have only this to say:

If you steal from me, I will seek recourse any way I can. Period.

And for those of you who want to debate ethical considerations here at hacker news, you may want to think twice about the persona you end up revealing in this public forum.

And for those of you who want to debate ethical considerations here at hacker news, you may want to think twice about the persona you end up revealing in this public forum.

Likewise. You might want to take heed of your own advice.

If you're treating everyone you do business with as people that will potentially rip you off, I wouldn't want to work with you. Its amazing at how quickly "Good intentions to prevent piracy" morph into "But my product cant be pirated. Fuck the customers. They're all crooks anyway."

You might want to take heed of your own advice.

For better or worse, I stand by everything I've ever posted here.

If you're treating everyone you do business with as people that will potentially rip you off

That's a leap you made, not me. I have always given everyone I've ever worked with every opportunity to succeed. Once they take advantage of me, all bets are off.

I wouldn't want to work with you.

One less thing for either of us to worry about. See how well this forum works?

That's a leap you made, not me. I have always given everyone I've ever worked with every opportunity to succeed. Once they take advantage of me, all bets are off.

That leap was primarily made because of the anecdotes you gave followed by If you steal from me, I will seek recourse in any way I can. Period. — There was nothing in the post that indicated that you would continue trust people (partners or customers) in business.

However, you have since said otherwise, which is enough for me.

One less thing for either of us to worry about. See how well this forum works? Quite well indeed. However I've never had a complaint about the workings of HN, on the technical side or otherwise.

Good grief, where are you meeting all these "partners"?

Somehow you managed to pick up more than your fair share of unethical people. Maybe you are doing something wrong.

Or maybe he's just unlucky, or maybe he's just decided that by paying attention to how people treat other people, he can get a good readout on how they'll treat him when the chips are down. There's a classic sales interview trick that has to do with taking the candidate out and seeing how he treats the waitstaff and how well he tips. Same idea.

It's also possible that he just has a lot more life experience than you.

Had you abvoided the ad-hom we could have had a conversation.

About whether edw519 is "doing something wrong" because he's had bad partners? Oh well. Another missed opportunity for me.

You sound like Job's friends.

Pirating software is not 'stealing' by legal definition or any other one. It is also not an issue of morality or ethics. If you cannot make money selling your software because everybody pirates it and nobody wants to buys it you are not a victim. You have simply chosen a failed business model.

It's not technically called "stealing", but license infringement.

You should tell all brick and morter retail stores to get rid of their cameras, security and other security measures. If people are not willing to pay for their products and instead chose to just steal them they have obviously a failed business model.

Seriously, are you taking the piss?

I work with folks who are genuinely shocked when I tell them that I bought a game. They come from a culture where pretty much everybody pirates, all the time, regardless of cost or income.

It's pretty funny, since they're game developers, and some of them dream of becoming indies.

I'm surprised that with all the talk of ethics, no one has mentioned the GNU/Stallman philosophy: those who are unethical are the ones making software but not making it free.

RMS advocates boycotting commercial software. He doesn't just copy what he wants.

Actually, given how strongly RMS believes in licenses I would expect him to think the unethical ones are both the ones not given away the software and the ones violating the license. After all, if they'll violate one why wouldn't they violate the other?

That philosophy just seems Martian to me.

It's a flawed philosophy that (often) goes against developers' best interests. I'm not surprised that it's not very popular around here.

Probably because the whole world is tired of listening to RMS blather on about what he thinks is ethical (the rhetoric on his website) and what he thinks is not ethical (every other opinion).

This is a strange objection. Why would an advocate for a cause promote the opposing viewpoint, except possibly to rebut it?

I'm not saying I agree with RMS. However, if he is rational I would expect him to agree with his own (current) writings. I would also expect that on an issue where he disagrees with others, he would disagree with their writings.

My software got pirated too: http://appulo.us/appdb/?page=viewapp&id=2732

I'm wearing this as badge of honor. :-) Of course I treat this lightly because I think that less then a quarter of iPhones are jailbroken, so I know there is a fairly low upper limit to this, uhm, "free promotion" so to speak.

Pirated copies should automatically call you. :)

Even better - pirated copies should automatically call his pay-per-call 800 number.

Cute :)

What's the piracy rate for iPhone apps?

Low, like the piracy rate for X360 titles.

Some ideas for increasing revenue in this case:

1. increase the unique value of the physical game package; include a T-shirt, stickers, something that makes possession of the package worthwhile to someone who's played the game long enough to identify with it; mention this addition in the intro or scores screen.

2. Run a contest on the scores server; if you are one of the high-scoring players this week and you can send in the code printed on the bottom of the box, then you get the reward. For greater psychological investment make the reward personalised with the players nick/score/rank on it.

What about abandonware? Consider two different scenarios. In the first, the manufacturer or distributor no longer makes the product (game) available, but it runs well enough under emulation. In the second, the manufacturer and distributor have both gone out of business. In both cases, the term of copyright has not expired. In both cases, the game is timeless enough to be worth playing even if it looks a bit dated.

You need to develop with mind to differentiate between the pay version of your software and the cracked version that the pirates will inevitably get. In gaming, the traditional differentiator is multiplayer, or access to a community forum where people exchange levels made with the level designer.

This is one thing that makes SaaS so attractive to developers -- generally it's impossible to pirate.

"... Software piracy is a fact of life, and there's very little you can do about it ..."

To those who see only what is, not what can be.

apropos: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=411985

It says you can prevent piracy by:

> writing a completely server-side application like World of Warcraft or Mint

But that is not true! World of Warcraft has lots of "private servers" where people play for free.

But the pirating is minimal compared to user base.

I don't get why he mentions Mint as well, since Mint is a free product (right now, that is). Can't pirate something that's free..

I guess if you block ads you're "pirating" Web apps. And unlike with software, the marginal cost of serving a user is nonzero.

However, mint has no ads, doesn't charge for the iPhone app I use all the time, has never spammed my account in any way... the only thing mint probably does make money from is commission from banks for referring new customers, but if mint can provide unbiased information about why switching from one bank account type to another can give me some sort of benefit (and in my limited experience, it has), it's a mutually beneficial relationship.

I am aware there are costs to providing a service, but when you provide them at no cost to your customers, that is not piracy.

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