Companies Coming Around To Piracy's Upside? 259
traycerb writes "The Economist has an article detailing how numerous companies are finding piracy's silver lining: 'Statistics about the traffic on file-sharing networks can be useful. They can reveal, for example, the countries where a new singer is most popular, even before his album has been released there. Having initially been reluctant to be seen exploiting this information, record companies are now making use of it. This month BigChampagne, the main music-data analyser, is extending its monitoring service to pirated video, too.' The kicker is Microsoft's tacit endorsement of Windows piracy in developing markets, namely China. The big man himself, Bill Gates, says it best in an interview with Fortune last year: 'It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not.'"
Mod parent up. (Score:5, Interesting)
Not just MS Office.
Back when it was WinNT vs NetWare, Microsoft was happy to allow "piracy" because Novell servers automatically checked licensing and would shut down if you tried to use the same license twice.
The PC Software Industry has known this for years (Score:4, Interesting)
For example MS, note that it was only with XP that they even tried to introduce some anti-piracy, and it is decidedly half-assed and low priority.
Good software companies have managed to have it both ways since the 80's and benefit from piracy and cracks spreading their best efforts, while making lots of noises about how bad it is so that those with money will be inclined to purchase it rather than take the risk. To my knowledge they only prosecute big black market dealers who are probably interfering with their attempts to set up profitable distribution channels.
I am sure they have numerical models in Redmond telling them exactly how much piracy vs. prosecution will maximize their profit in the various markets.
Only idiots like the RIAA are stupid enough to actually sue and thus alienate their basis directly and for all time.
Re:Old news for most (Score:5, Interesting)
That article reads like a young adult suddenly realizing how the world really works, but still stuck in the idea that everything they learned before must still be true.
[disclaimer: i'm the submitter]
definitely true, and to be expected from The Economist; like the WSJ and FT, it's just always going to have a rah-rah business attitude.
still, i think this is good insight into the big businesses' mindsets, and these are encouraging first signs of cracks in the old thinking, and maybe even a sneak preview of how things may change.
MS only really cares about large scale piracy (Score:5, Interesting)
When it comes to individuals pirating their software (their OS, Office, Visual Studio), Microsoft actually would prefer those people pirate their software instead of using alternatives. This is also the same reason they offer Windows, Office and Visual Studio at student discounts for well, students.
Microsoft would rather have young programmers pirate their Visual Studio and get used to developing in that environment rather than let's say Ubuntu + gvim + gcc. Also there is a chance that the average Joe who's on a pirated WxP copy will go out to BestBuy and buy Vista before calling in the slashdot cousin to upgrade his OS - which the average Joe wouldn't do if he was running Fedora. (This paragraph is directly from a Manager at Microsoft's Active Directory Services team - everything except for the /. cousin).
As someone else here has noted, MS only cares about piracy when businesses do it or large scale piracy happens (someone's making money from it). I get my genuine copies of Microsoft Software from their employee store (buddies of mine work at MS) at really cheap prices (35$ for XP Pro, Windows games at 10-20$, Xbox 360 games at 15-25$) but I know it costs next to nothing for MS to print out those copies - even 25$ == profit.
Re:Software Is NOT A Religion... (Score:3, Interesting)
NIN did this recently... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I'd be happy if pirates* would acknowledge... (Score:5, Interesting)
You're right that software isn't food or clothing. It isn't tangible. Thus, whoever created the software must have known that their efforts were going toward creation of a product that can not be bought or sold in the same manner that bread and milk are. With tangible goods, either one has or one does not have the item. With intangible products like software, music, or movies, the question of whether or not one has the item is ambiguous. I think the real problem here is that the global economy is based on the construct that all products bought and sold are tangible. The industrial revolution brought us the ability to make the same thing many times, with a lower unit cost due to volume discount. The concept of mass production is meaningless when the cost of replicating a product is zero. The internet eliminates the distribution cost and allows every consumer to become a reseller in a zero-cost market.
As a software engineer myself, I have come to realize one simple fact about the 21st century global market. I do not and can not sell the product of my efforts. I sell my effort itself. I provide a service for a fee. Eventually, most of the software people need will have already been created, and with any luck the software will be organized and self-governed by open source communities. The people in these communities will not be paid by the users of the software through some sort of licensing system. They will be paid by the companies who produce tangible goods that can be sold in the marketplace, companies who derive benefit from integrating the software into their business model. The software itself will be free. The value provided to these companies by the software engineers will be the integration and application of the software to improve revenue generation of some tangible product.
Re:Typical Slashdot Discussion On Theft, Er "Pirac (Score:2, Interesting)
Copyright is artificial, but that isn't an argument against it. Clothes, houses, medicine etc are all artificial and we like having those. It seems to me that the problem is that copyright advocates are arguing copyright as a natural right rather than a social contract and many people (1) don't believe that (2) don't care much about other peoples rights anyway. But to argue effectively for copyright as a social contract (which it is) will require that people see a benefit to themselves of that contract. "If you provide copyright protection, I will produce a movie which will pass into the public domain in time for your great great great grandchildren" doesn't cut it. "If you provide copyright protection, I will produce a movie which will pass into the public domain for you in 14 years" is much more likely to get people to cooperate.
I'm definitely in favour of copyright protection, but there needs to be reform so that people can see a practical benefit to themselves of supporting the system.
Re:I'd be happy if pirates* would acknowledge... (Score:3, Interesting)
The reason is a politically sound one. These copyright laws provide massive, "old man friendly" SLAPP (strategic litigation against public participation) suit hooks.
It was done with napster, closing that forum, it's done with websites far and wide right now with the dmca (false notices), it's being done with youtube despite the fact that 90% of what I see on or from youtube has nothing to do with copyrighted material.
The centralized media is systematically stamping out any avenues for public participation they themselves do not own, and politicians, tired of being caught in their lies and torn a new one, are helping them.
Welcome to the new era. It is doubtful, given that politicians have been sold on the biggest dot-bomb lie of "selling bits" like physical goods, that updates to anti-slapp laws will come in time to save the internet. It will be reduced to TV 2.0, and geeks will be designing something else, and saying "i'll be damned if i'm going to mention this anywhere near a government or corporate entity"
Re:I'd be happy if pirates* would acknowledge... (Score:4, Interesting)
it is illogical and detrimental to society for him to NOT pirate it (assuming he will actually use it)
Actually the developers of GIMP would benefit if he followed the law and used that instead. The more people who use software the more traction it gains. This is why piracy is bad to society.
Re:I'd be happy if pirates* would acknowledge... (Score:3, Interesting)
This post stinks of class-envy.
Don't you go psychoanalyzing me. I love capitalism, and if I ever get an opportunity to sell out and get rich doing music, I promise that I will be off like a shot.
I'm sure Tom Cruise probably does love acting (though there's plenty of evidence against if you've ever watched him ACT) but I know for damn sure that he isn't the richest actor in the country by virtue of being the best, and I am equally sure that we could have given that money to other people who would have used it to make better art.
The problem that I see with the state of pop culture is that it is based on a broadcast model, where there's very few providers of content and a zillion consumers. This was a technological necessity when the press, and later radio and TV and recorded media, were the big things.
Since those media were great at distributing a single stream of data to a whole bunch of people, the most efficient way to monetize content was to use marketing to make the world's music and TV and film tastes as homogeneous as possible.
This is why Hollywood makes so much boring crap, and why that boring crap is so commercially successful. They have spent billions of dollars convincing the entire world to like the same type of movie.