Software Piracy
Khayman tipped me to Wil Shipley’s blog, in particular his WWDC talk. This guy is awesome! His talk is terrific, but he also did a great job articulating my view on piracy.
In a nutshell: it doesn’t matter much. Who steals most software? The people who couldn’t afford to buy it in the first place. If people can pay, they generally will.
This is certainly true of myself. In my poor, college years, I certainly played more games than I actually paid for. And while I created a really, really neat movie of a sphere moving down a plank of window. (With multiple lighting sources, and a reflective surface to show the cube it passed. So it took 68 hours to render. So what? I was a senior tutor at the computer lab. I just hung a “this computer is broken sign” on the computer & turned of the monitor for a few days.) Yet I never paid the $3,000 that InfiniD was charging back then.
Should I feel bad? I don’t think so. These days it’s more common that I buy game that I end up playing little or not at all. For much the same reasons that Wil cites, I want to support the things I like so I see more of them. I don’t think there’s any pirated software on any of my computers at all. Heck, even my copy of Office is legit. (Having a brother at Microsoft helped on that one. ;-)
June 27th, 2005 at 9:05 am
piracy means your software is GOOD
June 27th, 2005 at 4:22 pm
One of the comments to Shipley’s blog noted that all the assumptions he makes about piracy are true in “honest” nations. But there are many countries around the world where even people who could afford to pay don’t if they can get away with it because it’s an accepted practice. How do we deal with that as the market becomes more and more a single global economy? No idea.
But on the whole I agree with his, and thus your’s Bill, assertions about SW piracy. Basically, all the kids who pirate software because they couldn’t afford it but WANTED it will buy a LOT more software over there lives than those that didn’t bother to pirate it when they were young and poor.