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Comment by jd | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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