Ask HN: How do you feel about pirated software? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you feel about pirated software?

6 pointsnirkalimi9 comments

I live in Silicon Valley, and pirated software seems to have mixed emotions across the board. Some are big proponents of open source, and if something isn't necessarily free , they don't mind breaking the rules to acquire it. On the other hand, many of those same people work at software companies that are providing them with a salary - and had it been the case that everyone pirates software, they would technically be out of a job.

So I ask you, what do you think about pirating software? When is it okay, if at all?

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Its a complex topic, or at least, the themes it inevitably raises are. To stop writing an essay, i'll just leave some dot-points on my perspective:

- Intellectual property doesn't make any sense to me. It seems more like a cultural practice rather than intellectual one, and just comes across as absurd. So someone trying to justify things based on it might as well be telling me what some god I don't believe in thinks about my sins...

- Its good, if you've got the resources to do so, to try to support people financially who produce things you like/use. The easiest way to do this is buying their stuff/sending them money.

- Its bad in general to be parasitical on the work of another, or dishonest about how/what you've done...

- The market/distribution of resources amongst society/law is not a moral authority, so the fact that a person has ownership over something, or that a certain product is for sale in a certain market for a certain price with certain barriers/conditions, doesn't imply anything universally, for or against. It is relatively easy to think of scenarios where i think its justified to participate in, or ignore, or fight against, any of those things.

So the long and short of it is that if you've got the money and you can support the author/creator of something that you like/use, you should find a way to get some of your money to them. You should REALLY do it if you're using it to make money yourself.

But i'm not going to lose sleep if a pimply teenager somewhere plays a game they didn't buy, people lend books, people copy software amongst their computers, use pirated software for their own education but don't make money from it, or people pirate where a market fails them in their ability to provide money to the creator/author at reasonable terms/price.

I'm not going to pretend I have a prescriptive solution for all of society. I think my rule of financially support the creators/authors of things you use if you can is a good personal rule of thumb, but i'd never seriously consider chasing up people copying my own work as long as they weren't trying to literally take credit for it and making substantial money via its use...

I feel like pirating software isn't really unethical if it's old, there's no legitimate channel to purchase it, and current software doesn't do the same thing. Under these circumstances, it may be technically illegal, but it's unlikely the IP owner will go after you.

Another circumstance where I'd say piracy is ethical is when you have purchased or otherwise legitimately obtained a license to the software, but you cannot access the actual software for some reason (maybe you have the software on a CD, but it is no longer readable).

I think "nocd" cracks are ethically okay for software you legitimately own. For younger readers: In the olden days, software came on a CD, and you had to have the physical CD in the drive in order to run it. A "nocd crack" is an unauthorized third-party patch which disables that check. It can save your day if the CD has gone bad, if you're lazy or disorganized so putting a CD in the drive is too much work, or if you don't want to lug around a ton of CD's with your laptop. Of course, since it breaks the 1:1 mapping between physical discs and running instances of the software, it makes actual piracy much easier.

Also, I believe patches that disable online-only DRM are ethical. This is the case where you legally own a piece of software which would be useful without the Internet, but the software's maker requires Internet connectivity to run the software, solely for copy protection purposes.

I'm speaking of ethics here, not law. Depending on certain fine points of law, I believe a case can be made that none of the above uses is actually legal in the United States.

I'm against it. People make all kinds of excuses why piracy isn't stealing, but at the end of the day the people who make the software need to get paid.

I draw the line for piracy OK or not OK on the simple question: are you making money with it?

If you're using e.g. Photoshop for your job, Adobe expects you to pay for the product... and if you're using it for private stuff, Adobe IMHO even wants you to pirate it (up to CS4.5 you only needed a keygen and a line in /etc/hosts, now you also have to patch a DLL file) in order to create a massive vendor lock in.

Microsoft followed the same strategy in China and elsewhere: create a massive lock-in, even if it means allowing piracy outright or just fighting it "pro forma", and when the people have enough money/education to use your product for business, they'll end up buying it because they're so used to it.

I understand making something free so as to make it a legacy platform, but do you really think that Adobe isn't already the industry standard?

I am also curious why you think adobe wants you to pirate their software? They seems to be the leader in the market in terms of design software and such. You pirating their software gives them one less sale - bottom line. They are a company who needs to make a profit at the end of the day.

Adobe's profits originate from the vast amount of companies and one-man startup/design shops using their products. Get the kids fixed on Photoshop while they're in school and the chance is high that they'll be using (and paying for) Adobe products throughout their career.

And for the "want" part: for a company like Adobe, it'd be easy and cheap to implement much more effective anti-piracy measures (e.g. hardware dongles like Steinberg's eDongle for Cubase). So I think they either don't care about piracy at all (because the profits are still huge) or they encourage piracy (see above for the reason) while still doing "something" to please shareholders.

I wonder how much of their consumer business does come from students/consumers, however. Autodesk is a little more niche but they give away their software to basically anyone who's not a professional (You can get almost all of their products for free if you are a student or even unemployed, IIRC). Adobe's student discounts are extremely weak by comparison, which may suggest a significant segment of their (paying) userbase is nonprofessional.

Regardless of ethical and legal considerations, what worries me the most is malware in cracking tools.

Piracy is not illegal where I live - never has been, so I don't really know how I "feel" about pirated software. Everybody here pirates software from left to right, and it's as normal as picking up money from the ground if happen to see it.

That said, I do pay for software I can't live without.

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