Piracy Economics 347
Reader Anonymous Coward the younger sends in a link to an article up at Mises.org on the market functions of piracy. The argument is that turning a blind eye to piracy can be a cheap way for a company to give away samples — one of the most time-proven tactics in marketing. The article also suggests that pirates creating knock-offs might just be offering companies market feedback that they ought to attend to. (Microsoft, are you listening?)
They do (Score:3, Informative)
Bill Gates, Pusher Man (Score:2, Informative)
Re:wtf? (Score:3, Informative)
Okay, this seems kinda bullshit to me... Why are we trying to prove that piracy, an illegal act, is somehow "good"?...
The human power of rationalization is quite strong indeed; no one is stupid enough to think that piracy is legal, and obviously people feel bad about it, so they try and make up stories saying how they're actually helping people by doing it. Yes, there are definitely valid points that need to be examined, as I said before, but still, it's illegal, and everyone knows it, so stop trying to justify it.
In case you don't know this, the Ludwig von Mises Institute [mises.org], where this article came from, is very much a pro business and capitalism libertarian organization and they don't generally like theft, infringment, or other crimes robbing people. There is no way in which they would justify piracy. In this particular case they are simply arguing small scale piracy may help a business that is seeing it's product(s) pirated.
FalconRe:wtf? (Score:3, Informative)
The law can be just as shady, like prohibition, for example, or DMCA... or for that matter, copyright...shady law that steals from the public disguised as "incentive".
Prohibition was and the DMCA is bad, but copyright itself is not bad. The only bad thing about copyrights as it stands now is that the copyright term is way too long. By giving writers and artists a limited monopoly on what they create gives them an incentive to create. If there is no incentive, financial, to create then many things won't be created, which is a greater theft to the public. Many people won't spend years of thier life creating something if they know they won't be able to feed their family while working on it.
FalconRe:Distributing Linux (Score:5, Informative)
Was a time when WINE was distributed under a BSD-like license. A few developers decided they didn't like Open Source anymore, so they split off and formed this company, Transgaming, taking the code base with them and slapped a slightly more restrictive license on it (restrictive enough that you couldn't call it Open Source anymore).
Their idea was that people pay a subscription which gives them voting rights. Whatever they voted on, the developers would work on. The big thing the users wanted was DirectX support for popular games. So that's what they worked on. Then the problem was copy protection systems.. so they started bundling some proprietary components with the software which made the copy protection work under Linux.
Meanwhile, over in the WINE camp, they decided to switch their license to GPL because the Transgaming people (and the cross-over Office people) weren't giving their changes back. In fact, the next time someone asks you why the GPL is more popular than the BSD license, tell them about WINE. Anyway, all that work that Transgaming and the others did really inspired a lot of people to join the WINE project. It provided proof that WINE could do what people had been saying for years that it could do.
As yet, WINE is still not at the 1.0 stage.. It's still not easy for users to get an obscure "vertical market" piece of software working under WINE.
I know this isn't exactly what you were thinking.. but it does show that the ability to take Open Source in directions that the original authors are reluctant or otherwise slow to go really is a great strength.
Re:As I recall... (Score:3, Informative)
If you are going to compare with other platforms, you can compare Deluxe Paint. This was probably the most pirated software program on the Amiga - everyone and his uncle had a copy. Still, sales from this program helped propel a small-time software company named Electronic Arts to great heights. Heck, I personally bought four copies (different versions; DPaint II NTSC, DPaint II PAL, DPaint III and DPaint IV) even though it was trivially easy to bypass the copy protection.
BTW, I have bought PageStream three times - versions 2, 3 and 5. An excellent program and IMHO InDesign is just now starting to catch up to PageStream 3's featureset. PageMaker never even got close to PageStream 2...
Re:So Rape is good (Score:2, Informative)
Oracle (Score:2, Informative)
1. Offer database and development tools to developers free of charge
2. Wait until applications built by these developers get into production
3. Call and remind that database and development tools are not free
4. Profit!
Re:As I recall... (Score:2, Informative)
Apple was luck rnough to have a good entrenchment in schools, and kept just a large enough following outside of the major professional markets (such as video and audio) to live long enough for reason to return (Steve Jobs) and re-orientate the vision back to sanity. Jobs is a born leader, Gasse was not. Irving Gould was a mere investor and should have learnt his place. Medhi Ali was not a good leader, TJ Rattigan was.
Really, Apple's defeat was kicking Jobs out. Commodore's defeat was kicking Tramiel out. Atari's defeat was taking Tramiel on (Tramiel was notorious for undehanded tactics with suppliers and it hurt him when at Atari badly, Atari was better off with anyone else for a good chunk of time and it was just "Too Late" by the time he corrected things.)
Microsoft won for the longest time because nothing else had penetration. OS/2 was not a very penetrating OS. MS-DOS and Windows were. When almost every PC clone has MS-DOS, you know that marketing and tactics have won, not necessarily quality. OS/2 may be still on the ATM you visit, but is it a winner in the end?
Piracy helped MS alot, but it also could have killed them if any serious competitor were to have arisen prior to 1995. Linux and BSD just weren't there, Apple was kinda in a limbo (not good enough to entice the masses, but on the flipside, not that crappy to totally die off). Who was there to step up? Commodore was then d e d - dead. Atari? Pfft, they were even deader, rotting maggots dead. Sinclair? TI? Osbourne? Nope, all minor players by then, if even in the personal computing arena even.
Thats why MS won in the end. Now, most people associate a PC and Windows. MS was just better managed, held a reasonable amount of respect within the general populace, and was able to sustain life into near monopoly.
Personally I am after either Linux or Apple or both to get a metric tonne more users so that some real competition gets going. Both camps have a serious contender, but aren't currently getting the "Main Event" fight.
You can pirate anything (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/01/technology/01pi
Re:wtf? (Score:2, Informative)
What in flying fuck are you talking about? It is illegal. Did you mean to say that it's not criminal?
There are two different types of illegal activity, criminal offences and civil offences. Copyright infringement is usually a civil offence, and that's what people mean when they say that copyright infringement is not a crime. They don't mean that it isn't illegal, they mean that it's a civil offence, not a criminal offence. You appear to be mindlessly repeating a factoid you misunderstood the first time around. Please don't talk nonsense.
Re:wtf? (Score:3, Informative)