My Software Is Being Pirated

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001201.html

by lehmannro • 18 years ago

53 121 18 years ago

ambition• 18 years ago

I'm bothered by Jeff's attitude that a game made by a bigger company is somehow more deserving of piracy.

Herring• 18 years ago

Blame human psychology. Jeff knows it's harder to pirate from "the little guys" so he plays on guilt. I'm sure most pirates are open to rational arguments though.

derefr• 18 years ago

An interesting psychological effect: Diffusion of responsibility, in reverse. If, in a situation where individual contribution to an act is miniscule, no one is to "blame" for making something negative, then no one is also to reward if the result is positive. If a big company creates value, no one individually created that value in any meaningful way, so the value is psychologically "ownerless."

Is this an actual effect? I feel like doing an experiment.

froo• 18 years ago

I wouldn't say its necessarily so, take Microsoft - its a corporation with thousands of employees that work on its products, but how many people hold Gates personally responsible for the failings of Windows?

This example is a fairly mainstream idea... it made an appearance in the South Park movie.

ii2• 18 years ago

It's very simple: for bigger company piracy is more like a form of advertising, but for a small one it can actually hurt and kill the small guys.

khafra• 18 years ago

Cory Doctorow is one of the most copyright reform-advocacy-minded people around, and he makes the opposite claim: [paraphrased] "the problem for independent artists isn't piracy, it's obscurity."

If A is the set of people that've heard of your product sans piracy, and B is the people that've heard of it after piracy, then the gap between B' that pirates and B had better be smaller than the gap between A and B. That's likelier for a tiny producer than a huge one.

patio11• 18 years ago

"Charge a fair price for it." seems to be a meaningless platitude in this instance, sort of a soup-bone to the "I'm only pirating because it is overpriced" apologetics. Isn't the whole point of the anecdote that World of Goo is, umm, more than fairly priced? (Seriously, people are pirating a $20 pass to pure gaming joy which requires a machine minimally ten times as expensive to run. Probably a hundred times for many of the pirates, since they are gaming enthusiasts.)

Want a recipe for being pirated less? Make something that people wouldn't want to get for free. crickets chirp Actually, that probably won't even help -- I think a large portion of piracy is essentially pathological. Bingo Card Creator -- an which assists primary school English teachers who are, on average, not likely to be reading Chinese pirate forums -- got spikes of 10k+ downloads when the new cracks were released.

It even had a description translated into Chinese... which was hilarious. (My brother translated for me: "Apparently it's like a gambling game for English or some shit.")

Honestly its like putting a shiny object in front of that bird with the unhealthy fascination for shiny objects whose name I am forgetting at the moment. If your code compiles, it will be pirated. You could make a Windows forms calculator with only a plus button, with an equals sign available with a CD Key, and people would pirate that. (I've often thought of trying it.)

ajkirwin9• 18 years ago

I see this argument a lot, "Oh well, it's cheap, so people should just pay for it!" and it seems to gloss over one important fact.

Money is not an unlimited resource.

If there are say.. $4,000 (purchase price) of fun and awesome things released in a year, and the average person after things like bills, rent/mortgage, etcetera only has say.. $500 left to actually spend on frivolity, then they might decide the following:

"Well, I guess I will download the rest. It's not like they are losing a sale. I don't HAVE any money, anyway!".

And, if this is the case, it's true. No-one actually LOSES anything. You can't lose a sale you could never have made anyway.

So such numbers can be shockingly misleading.

gcheong4• 18 years ago

But is it OK for someone to benefit from something they aren't willing to pay for? What is the difference between someone who decides to go without because they don't or can't pay and someone who says I can't/won't pay so I'll just copy it from someone else? Is it morals or economics?

Scriptor• 18 years ago

I would agree with your opinion if a vast majority of people who have computers and Internet connections could not afford another $20. But what if there was no pirated version of this game available? I think you'd find that, if it's not too inconvenient, more people would actually buy the game.

For example, console games don't suffer as much from pirating, but what if hypothetically it was as easy to pirate a game for your Wii or 360 as it was for your PC? I very much doubt that people would continue to buy the games.

So basically, the very presence of pirated games available for free is taking sales away from the game makers, people are simply choosing the free option.

jbjohns15• 18 years ago

What you say is true, but what percentage of people are not paying because they can't afford it vs. the one's who just don't want to pay for it?

While it is true that someone downloading a game that they couldn't have paid for doesn't deprive the maker of money, it's quite a slippery slope.

nazgulnarsil• 18 years ago

they might have bought it next year.

greendestiny• 18 years ago

You don't know how many people would prioritize this game over other spending if they couldn't get it for free. Only things that you can pirate can you choose to get for free so it gets prioritized lower than it deserves.

pmorici• 18 years ago

What about a hardware token? Are those effective?

tptacek15• 18 years ago

No, because the software title itself is still software, dongle or not; the exact same techniques crack dongle titles as crack downloadable shareware. Which is why very few titles use dongles.

trevelyan• 18 years ago

Magpie

lunchbox• 18 years ago

>You could make a Windows forms calculator with only a plus button, with an equals sign available with a CD Key, and people would pirate that. (I've often thought of trying it.)

Made me think of this:

http://blort.org/~kgasso/images/how-to-catch-script-kiddies....

hexis• 18 years ago

What's the piracy rate for iPhone apps?

tptacek15• 18 years ago

Low, like the piracy rate for X360 titles.

qqq• 18 years ago

It says you can prevent piracy by:

> writing a completely server-side application like World of Warcraft or Mint

But that is not true! World of Warcraft has lots of "private servers" where people play for free.

bjelkeman-again• 18 years ago

But the pirating is minimal compared to user base.

silencio2• 18 years ago

I don't get why he mentions Mint as well, since Mint is a free product (right now, that is). Can't pirate something that's free..

wmf• 18 years ago

I guess if you block ads you're "pirating" Web apps. And unlike with software, the marginal cost of serving a user is nonzero.

matthew-wegner• 18 years ago

The article lacks any real point--the only solid point he's making is, "if you write software and charge money for it, your software will be pirated."

He then implies some software "deserves" to be pirated, by claiming World of Goo falls outside that category (because it isn't from the "bowels" of a "faceless EA-Activision franchise sweatshop").

Many independent game developers don't view piracy as black and white. I would be interested in reading an article where someone makes a hypothesis one way or the other, and backs it up. This article isn't that.

And, for the record, the amended World of Goo piracy rate is 82%. 2D Boy mentions that in an update on the very same blog post Jeff links to, but I guess that would mean he would've had to read beyond the title to notice: http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/

jd• 18 years ago

Quote:

   In fact, the most effective anti-piracy software development strategy is the simplest one of all:

   1. Have a great freaking product.
   2. Charge a fair price for it.

Is he joking? The World of Goo is a great freaking product. And The World of Goo is fairly priced at $20. And yet the piracy rate is still at 82% or so. So where does Jeff base his "in fact" anti-piracy claim on?

quantumhobbit2• 18 years ago

"So where does Jeff base his "in fact" anti-piracy claim on?"

I would attribute it to wishful thinking based on an assumption of human morality. The truth is that people are lazy and don't consider the morality of their actions. How else can the rampant piracy of tv shows freely available on hulu.com be explained? The commercials are very short and the quality is good. Pirates are in the habit of getting their software from bittorrent and don't even look for a legal method of obtaining the software they use.

jbjohns15• 18 years ago

Actually the "free" TV shoes are easily explained. Not everyone who lived in america and got addicted to these shows lives there now. You can't watch the shows on the broadcaster's web site unless you live in country, so if you live in another country that speaks a different language then you will have to either (a) wait some months to get a dubbed version, (b) wait over a year to buy the season DVD or (c) download it.

kaens2• 18 years ago

Meh, in the case of music and games, I know a lot of people who pirate as a "try before you buy" type of thing, and then shell out the cash for the product if they think it's worth it.

I do this with music (I recently dropped illegal art a sum of money equal to what I've downloaded due to Girl Talk and a few other awesome artists on that label).

timknauf• 18 years ago

Remember that not everyone lives in the USA. Nearly everything on hulu.com is limited to US IP addresses only, because they're still wrangling with international licensing for most of the shows on there. Online video stores like iTunes and Xbox Live have anaemic-to-nonexistent lineups outside of North America.

Bittorrent, on the other hand, doesn't much care where in the world you are.

jamiequint• 18 years ago

I download tv shows because I don't want to wait the 8 days that the network delays stuff from appearing online. I would gladly watch them on Hulu with commercials if it were not for this.

hassy• 18 years ago

You see, Jeff Atwood prefers talking about software to actually making software, by a long, long shot. Most of his writings are nothing more than summaries of other people's work, sometimes padded with some theorizing and sweeping generalizations of his own. His writing style may make him seem like an expert, but he isn't.

cchooper• 18 years ago

I guess it's the best piracy policy precisely because it totally ignores piracy.

siong1987• 18 years ago

Something is wrong here. What is fair price? It depends from country to country. In US, USD20 may be a fair price for everyone. But, how many of the game users are actually from countries other than US?

In some developing countries, USD20 is about a day salary or 10 meals.

MisterMerkin• 18 years ago

I'd pay 5 bucks for it. The last time I sprung for a game, The Ship, it was $5.

vegai• 18 years ago

>And yet the piracy rate is still at 82% or so.

That figure'd be a lot more useful if we knew what the usual piracy rate is.

electromagnetic• 18 years ago

If piracy rates haven't changed in 32 years and are still at 90% doesn't that mean piracy doesn't hurt technology?

Developers have a perverted view, they think 90% of people are stealing their product. When really 90% of people wouldn't pay to use your product to begin with.

This is when DRM comes in and the developer tries to force this 90% to pay. However, people either hack the DRM or simply don't use the product. I imagine Linux got a lot more users when Microsoft started implementing DRM and some people didn't want to fight with it.

Adobe and Microsoft prices are ridiculous, why? Because they make money off the 10%, not off hunting the 90%. Microsoft doesn't even actively target pirates, it doesn't check every time you go to send an error report, it doesn't check every time you log in. Why? Because the 90% of people are an amazing resource to hunt down problems that will make the 10% pay even more, specifically big business.

tptacek15• 18 years ago

Adobe doesn't "hunt the 90%" because doing so would impose conditions so onerous on the remaining 10% that they would lose business. So instead, they jack the price of Illustrator and Photoshop up to the limit of what the 10% will pay.

likpok• 18 years ago

Also because it increases adoption of their product. Then, when those people go to work, they say "I know and need Photoshop/Illustrator/whatever". Businesses are easier to enforce piracy with, and will pay more.

edw5192• 18 years ago

I love threads like this because they show who's who.

One of the many reasons I joined hacker news was to meet like minded people for possible future collaboration. Sometimes you really get to know each other here.

AFAIC, there is no gray area in ethical matters. Right is right and wrong is wrong. If you use situational ethics to justify what is clearly wrong, you may have made an interesting argument, but you have also done one other thing: you have automatically disqualified yourself from ever doing business with me (and probably many others here, I suspect.)

A little background:

I once wrote some software that a partner installed in a remote client site for which our company got paid. Unbeknowst to me, he also installed that software at another site and kept all the money.

I bought the used car from one of my partners at an agreed upon price and found out later that he had disconnected the speedometer for as many as 50,000 miles.

Another partner of mine had a side business selling hardware and negotiated a backroom deal with our customer that jeapordized our major project.

One IT director where I worked had software salesmen leave their documentation for "project review", photocopied it, and used it for our own functional specs, with no intention of ever buying anything.

Starting to get the idea of how "you wouldn't have made any money anyway" easily morphs into "fuck you"?

And as far as software pirating goes, I have only this to say:

If you steal from me, I will seek recourse any way I can. Period.

And for those of you who want to debate ethical considerations here at hacker news, you may want to think twice about the persona you end up revealing in this public forum.

Zev2• 18 years ago

And for those of you who want to debate ethical considerations here at hacker news, you may want to think twice about the persona you end up revealing in this public forum.

Likewise. You might want to take heed of your own advice.

If you're treating everyone you do business with as people that will potentially rip you off, I wouldn't want to work with you. Its amazing at how quickly "Good intentions to prevent piracy" morph into "But my product cant be pirated. Fuck the customers. They're all crooks anyway."

edw5192• 18 years ago

You might want to take heed of your own advice.

For better or worse, I stand by everything I've ever posted here.

If you're treating everyone you do business with as people that will potentially rip you off

That's a leap you made, not me. I have always given everyone I've ever worked with every opportunity to succeed. Once they take advantage of me, all bets are off.

I wouldn't want to work with you.

One less thing for either of us to worry about. See how well this forum works?

jbjohns15• 18 years ago

Good grief, where are you meeting all these "partners"?

DenisM3• 18 years ago

Somehow you managed to pick up more than your fair share of unethical people. Maybe you are doing something wrong.

tptacek15• 18 years ago

Or maybe he's just unlucky, or maybe he's just decided that by paying attention to how people treat other people, he can get a good readout on how they'll treat him when the chips are down. There's a classic sales interview trick that has to do with taking the candidate out and seeing how he treats the waitstaff and how well he tips. Same idea.

It's also possible that he just has a lot more life experience than you.

jimbokun3• 18 years ago

You sound like Job's friends.

brl6• 18 years ago

Pirating software is not 'stealing' by legal definition or any other one. It is also not an issue of morality or ethics. If you cannot make money selling your software because everybody pirates it and nobody wants to buys it you are not a victim. You have simply chosen a failed business model.

jbjohns15• 18 years ago

It's not technically called "stealing", but license infringement.

You should tell all brick and morter retail stores to get rid of their cameras, security and other security measures. If people are not willing to pay for their products and instead chose to just steal them they have obviously a failed business model.

Seriously, are you taking the piss?

bm98• 18 years ago

I'm surprised that with all the talk of ethics, no one has mentioned the GNU/Stallman philosophy: those who are unethical are the ones making software but not making it free.

acangiano2• 18 years ago

It's a flawed philosophy that (often) goes against developers' best interests. I'm not surprised that it's not very popular around here.

tptacek15• 18 years ago

RMS advocates boycotting commercial software. He doesn't just copy what he wants.

gruseom• 18 years ago

That philosophy just seems Martian to me.

jbjohns15• 18 years ago

Actually, given how strongly RMS believes in licenses I would expect him to think the unethical ones are both the ones not given away the software and the ones violating the license. After all, if they'll violate one why wouldn't they violate the other?

brl6• 18 years ago

Probably because the whole world is tired of listening to RMS blather on about what he thinks is ethical (the rhetoric on his website) and what he thinks is not ethical (every other opinion).

JabavuAdams2• 18 years ago

This is a strange objection. Why would an advocate for a cause promote the opposing viewpoint, except possibly to rebut it?

I'm not saying I agree with RMS. However, if he is rational I would expect him to agree with his own (current) writings. I would also expect that on an issue where he disagrees with others, he would disagree with their writings.

DenisM3• 18 years ago

My software got pirated too: http://appulo.us/appdb/?page=viewapp&id=2732

I'm wearing this as badge of honor. :-) Of course I treat this lightly because I think that less then a quarter of iPhones are jailbroken, so I know there is a fairly low upper limit to this, uhm, "free promotion" so to speak.

acangiano2• 18 years ago

Pirated copies should automatically call you. :)

1gor• 18 years ago

Even better - pirated copies should automatically call his pay-per-call 800 number.

ramchip• 18 years ago

Cute :)

olefoo• 18 years ago

Some ideas for increasing revenue in this case:

1. increase the unique value of the physical game package; include a T-shirt, stickers, something that makes possession of the package worthwhile to someone who's played the game long enough to identify with it; mention this addition in the intro or scores screen.

2. Run a contest on the scores server; if you are one of the high-scoring players this week and you can send in the code printed on the bottom of the box, then you get the reward. For greater psychological investment make the reward personalised with the players nick/score/rank on it.

rms• 18 years ago

You need to develop with mind to differentiate between the pay version of your software and the cracked version that the pirates will inevitably get. In gaming, the traditional differentiator is multiplayer, or access to a community forum where people exchange levels made with the level designer.

This is one thing that makes SaaS so attractive to developers -- generally it's impossible to pirate.

bootload• 18 years ago

"... Software piracy is a fact of life, and there's very little you can do about it ..."

To those who see only what is, not what can be.

JabavuAdams2• 18 years ago

I work with folks who are genuinely shocked when I tell them that I bought a game. They come from a culture where pretty much everybody pirates, all the time, regardless of cost or income.

It's pretty funny, since they're game developers, and some of them dream of becoming indies.

gcv• 18 years ago

What about abandonware? Consider two different scenarios. In the first, the manufacturer or distributor no longer makes the product (game) available, but it runs well enough under emulation. In the second, the manufacturer and distributor have both gone out of business. In both cases, the term of copyright has not expired. In both cases, the game is timeless enough to be worth playing even if it looks a bit dated.

sanj• 18 years ago

apropos: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=411985

My Software Is Being Pirated

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