#Copy protection?
9 messages in this thread
Yeah, I didn't think I had a grip on it….
We had some sort of "announcement" at work involving the notion that
anyone who had DoubleSpace on their hard drive had to take it off (which I
didn't understand because I thought the Stac/MS judgement only involved
future sales); the notice (I got no "official" copy, since I use a Unix-
platform at work) implied that neither MS nor Stac could support the
product. I didn't think too much about it because the people who write
these "company announcements" rarely know anything technical, but now that
you mention it….
Mr. C (Amiga: Muerte O Suerte?)
Dongle suck! I hate having to power down a system to swap out a joystick or
parrallel port dongle. My ideal world would have the companies cut their final
cost by getting rid of the dongles and passing the savings on to the purchaser.
People don't balk at buying cheap software that does the job!
Pirates don't consider the price of software. They just want it, regardless of
price. It's not possible to reduce the price of software indefinitely… you
need to consider the effort involved in creating the software, the demand for
the software (i.e., the total number of potential buyers) as well as the price
of support.
You can't expect good technical support if the software is cheap. Lowering the
price indefinitely certainly increases the risk that the company might go
"belly up" sooner than later. There's no easy way to raise the price of
software, once it's been lowered.
I agree that the creators of the software deserve their compensation, but some
software prices are outrageous, especially in the WINDOZE and Lackingtosh
worlds. I also agree that hardcore pirateers will probably stop at nothing to
illegally duplicate software. The point that I was trying to get across was
that a lower price would help prevent the average shmoe from installing an
"evaluation" copy of software on his/her harddisk. I feel that these people
pirate not due to any overwhelming desire to pirate, but out of a fear of
spending several hundred dollars on software that doesn't suit their needs. I
also tried to raise the issue of how much the hardware protection costs, and
that one way of cutting end user prices would be by eliminating the dongles.
Kim
If you think a program's price is "outrageous," then you don't have to buy it –
but please don't pirate it, either. The high price is not a justification for
stealing someone else's work! If you understood my last message, you should
realize that some software might be priced high because of either little demand
or high demand… that's what a marketplace is all about. People often say,
"well, you can sell a million at $100 or one at $100 million, and you'll make
the same amount of money." Not true – the tech support and sales overhead is
very different in those two cases.
Even if software was $25, I think people would still "evaluate" the same way.
What's the difference between saving $25 and saving $200? I see people drive
an hour to save $5 on a product "on sale" across town.
<< We had some sort of "announcement" at work involving the notion that
anyone who had DoubleSpace on their hard drive had to take it off (which I
didn't understand because I thought the Stac/MS judgement only involved
future sales) >>
I believe you are correct — you don't need to remove DoubleSpace from
legitimately purchased copies.
As reported in the April 1994 issue of The Computer Lawyer (p. 2), "In
response to the verdict, Microsoft is now releasing MS-DOS without any
data compression feature, as DOS version 6.21. Owners of MS-DOS versions
6.0 and 6.2 can continue to use the infringing DoubleSpace compression
utility, however, since Stac will receive damages to cover all infringing
copies already sold."
Does this mean the Compression and de-compression software calls have also been
removed from MS-DOS, or just the use of them for disk compression? HarryM
I'm not an MSDOS user, so all I can tell you is the excerpt I posted. I
gotta believe that the calls were removed, too, though.
Harry,
My *guess* is that they removed the programs dblspace.* which had the
compression routines, but left the hooks in boot code and OS itself to preload
their future version of dblspace (without offending code).
Don