Dataset piracy
13 messages in this thread
John,
As someone who stands to (theoretically, anyway;^} loose money on this, I
will be happy to pass particulars along to Viewpoint if you feel
uncomfortable doing so. In fact, if I had an "Uncle Vinnie" with
'freinds' in New York, I'd tell him too!
wmc – via Autopilot!
I think Viewpoint's known about it for a long time.
It's just another example of "pirate tools." I'm not sure what exactly they
can bust him for… selling a key is one thing. Selling a program that
performs a hot-patch on an executable to unlock it is another. Or what about
even giving away the secret to the encryption over the Internet? In lawyer's
terms, I'd think the most clearly "actionable" item is selling the key. Given
the openness which other pirating tools exist (dongle crackers, disk copiers,
etc) exist, I'm not sure what they could prosecute them for. On the other
hand, it's clear that some sort of damage has been done, and could result in
civil suits.
Hi,
I've read you for a long time here and always appreciate you thoughtful
insights into things. I posted eleswhere, during an Alpha Paint thread some
thoughts on Piracy, copy protection and such and would like to know your
thoughts. We've worked closely with the FBI and SPA with great results. I would
submit that one of the reasons the Amiga had problems getting Devs. to port or
create is the P word and the causal way programs are shared. People either
can't read the licence agreements or don't care or both. Peolple seem to think
its Ok to get on the net and sell stolen prop. or download a program from a
P-BBS to try it then make money with it and not pay the creator one dime. It's
no wonder true innovation rarely happens. We must find a way to protect
inventors/developers, make it easy for the users and not get in the way of
ideas or growth. Products of the company I work for are continually ripped off
and we're tired of it. I can see why Scala and other have gone the dongal
route. I've also seen some neg. comments on this and don't really understand
them. Your thoughts and a discussion of this this would be appreciated by many.
It is many peoples fear that if users don't start supporting developers that
there won't be any anymore. I'm not sure that's true…but close.
Tom Patrick
I was once tempted to think that piracy existed to a higher degree on the Amiga
platform. Now I'm not so sure. I guess I've found just as muany unscrupulous
pirates using PCs and Macs. People who collect everything related to the topics
they like to investigate or play with or use for business… Speaking of the
SPA and FBI, I've even seen far too many large companies who are members of the
SPA who are not absolutists when it comes to enforcing licenses within their
own company. For this reason, I take a dim view of the SPA. I think its
annual estimates of piracy are entirely the wrong approach to the problem.
Like many other ethical issues, I think a personal approach is much better.
People need to realize that piracy does affect many small, innovative software
developers who are nowhere as rich as Bill(ion) Gates.
Thanks John,
On the SPA numbers…I was wondering about that too.
Of Course on the PC, you have (hopefully) enough paying volume to survive
despite HUGE piracy, particularly in Asia… not so many Amigas there…
If you only care about the 1st 50000 users of your product to recoup
costs, then selling 100,000 and having 1 million copies in use is not so
mortal a wound. I have been skeptical of the implicit assumption that
every pirated copy of software represents a lost sale.
Every pirated copy doesn't equal a lost sale. However, I do believe that
some percentage does equal lost sales.
I'm sure we're in agreement about all this, but one more point:
"If you only care about the 1st 50000 users of your product to recoup
costs, then selling 100,000 and having 1 million copies in use is not so
mortal a wound."
What about some of the other 900,000 who call up and try and get technical
support for a product they never bought? That hurts the company too. The
company's response might simply be "If you don't have a registration here,
no support", but it still costs the company time and money to answer that
call.
I guess that's why NewTek put a dongle on the standalone LightWave, huh? 🙂
How many companies do you know that are only in business to "recoup costs"?
Nine-tenths piracy is killer. Companies need continuous sales to stay afloat,
and growth to survive. Advertising dollars and other promotion costs are
"selling" to pirate as well as regular customers… now your ad dollars are
1/10 as effective. What next?
The 1/10 figure is purely hypothetical right…
I was merely pointing out that at X% piracy, a company with a base of
10million potential users can survive where a company with 1million
potential users may not. This is based on the perhaps absurd assumption
that the development costs are more-or-less the same regardless of the
number of potential users.
Dongles are of debatable effectiveness, but all's fair in love and war..
I'm still waiting to see a company with the balls enough or so little to
lose that they employ active countermeasures in their software…
what would be a company's liability if their SW reformatted the users HD
when he ran an illegal copy? Considering that they have no liability when
they trash a users system by accident…
I believe a well-known Amiga personality who I won't name here was asked
to put a "don't pirate" message in some software once, and accidently
screwed it up. The customers were very upset to get that message.
I think that if a company had a program that would reformat a disk if the
copy was illegal, they'd be sued bigtime.
> I think that if a company had a program that would reformat a disk if
> the copy was illegal, they'd be sued bigtime.
I heard that one large software company released an application which
contained a message saying "formatting hard disc now" if it detected an
attempt to bypass the copy protection. Someone got the message when his
key disc went faulty and he sued the company for mental anguish.
Peter Wade
Autopiloting from London, England
>>Dongles are of debatable effectiveness
Not only that, they are extremely obtrusive to a multitasking system where
you may want to use two dongled tools simultaneously but only have one
"dongle port" available. Most dongles don't pass through or stack very
well.
wmc – via Autopilot!
As we all know about piracy, it's tough to determine the rate of piracy on a
given product. A company only sees its sales, and I'd argue that the size of
the company will change to reflect the sales figures.
The installation of Chicago has an optional section that dials your modem and
sends the registration info directly to Microsoft. It may or may not be
sending additional information about what's in your system. Didn't an early
version of Prodigy's software search your hard disk for mailing addresses?