App Store Honour System
mahdiyusuf.com
mahdiyusuf.com
Of all the digital stuff Apple sells, music is by far the easiest to pirate.
—
† No watermarks either. The tracks contain the Apple ID of the purchaser as well as purchase date and time as metadata that is easy enough to strip away.
E.g., person 1 would tell person 2 that the first 32 characters of the sha-256 hash (represented as a hexadecimal string) was "47905a1f67a826d1ca5321e3473266d9". Person 2 tells person 1 that the remaining 32 characters are "7616ac096cb069098bcd2e12b2ed0c0d".
In our scenario, these two people have no interest in tricking each other - so they use the files that they bought and tell the truth when stating their part of the hash. The company from which the files were bought are assumed to not know that these two people are working together, since they might otherwise serve the same watermark to the two people.
Edit: In fact, these "two people" could even be just one guy who traveled to a foreign country, purchased a brand new computer, a pre-payed card, went to a library and registered with bogus details, bought some files. Then, s/he traveled to another country where s/he did the same thing (new computer, pre-payed card, went to some Internet café and used other, bogus, details to buy the same files) and compared the hashes as described above.
Edit 2: Or, s/he could order the pre-payed cards online, bought from two separate resellers using bitcoins, and use two separate VPN-s (also paid for with bitcoins) from a computer that was assumed to not leak any sensitive information (because the computer was bought for this purpose, and therefore never used for anything that could be tied to him/her, s/he used an Open Source Operating System, and s/he switched out the NIC and the USB-stick used to boot the computer between each time), with each VPN session being made from different places sufficiently away from your home, and at times sufficiently far apart (3-6 months, maybe).
For instance, I have a PC, a Macbook Air, iPad, and iPhone; those take up four of the five authorizations. I could theoretically then spend this last one on the friend, sure -- but I'm fairly confident that devices can only be linked with one account at a time.
Furthermore, I'd argue that this issue would only be relevant with relatively expensive Apps. Frankly, I pirate music because most of the stuff I'm looking for is either otherwise unavailable or exorbitantly expensive -- conversely, the amount of effort it takes to pirate a .99c app isn't work the headache and coordination.
I'd argue that this has been Steam's biggest success, as well -- reducing piracy because it's comparatively too much effort.
There are much more signifcant apps on the Mac app store than the simple .99 cent ones.
Even when there was a number limit, it never crossed the PC–iPod barrier. When music still had DRM you could play it on five PCs/Macs and an unlimited number of iPods.
As a developer, what's more important to you: more revenue or noone pirating your software?
I'd say it's possible (and I'd guess, probable) that for the vast majority of App developers, they get more net revenue from the increased exposure and ease of payment that the App store provides than they would get from trying to sell the software through their own channels.
>Would it be impressive to be able to assert that every single copy of your software was paid for?
I can assert every copy of software I run on my machine is 100% free software. However, I didn't pay for it.
> It’s fairly trivial for me to buy an application and simply stroll over to my friend’s computer, login using my credentials and download the application without much issue.
Sure, but you're not most App Store users. It's absolutely not trivial for most people to do this, but a huge pain in the ass.
I'm also not sure I like the idea of having an always-on internet based DRM built into every bit of software I use. Not being able to play a game because my internet connection is down is one thing, having it completely cripple my ability to get any work done is another thing altogether. In fact that may drive legit users towards piracy, since you would only need to be stung by that once.
I can't imagine there are enough people dealing with that hassle to material effect sales.
There are plenty of apps on the app store where all you have to do is zip up the application's directory and send it to a friend. This means that you don't even need to log into your account on their Mac. All you have to do is install the update, zip it, and toss it in dropbox or send it in an e-mail.
This is a gaping hole in Apple's infrastructure. While circumventing piracy completely is impossible, it really shouldn't be this simple either.
Know that it exists and don’t use the App Store if you don’t like it. Simple as that.
The ability to log in to a friend's computer and install your software on their system without limits may well be a "gaping hole", but is unrelated to apps that don't opt in to Apple's DRM.
No, they won't, because it's impossible. They'll sue an extremely small proportion of the "pirates" and lose money in the process: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100713/17400810200.shtml
Ridiculous is thinking this is a better approach than not suing your customers.
Would it be impressive to be able to assert that every single copy of your software was paid for?
Yes, absolutely! What kind of web browser would one use?
Of course, if you mean a licensed instead of paid, then not, it's not. Here: http://www.debian.org/distrib/
I personally know of this KIND of thing happening, and their customers are delighted at their service.