What more reason do you need for Webapps / Software as a Service?

There is another point: If you target your app to teens - most games qualify for this, then you always get some piracy. They don't earn money yet and have enough time to search for cracks/hacks.

When I was young I also didn't pay for all software - this changed when I grew older...

You could read (if you haven't done yet) Brad Wardell (Stardock CEO) stance on games DRM, piracy,... and for example his "gamer's bill of rights". A part of it related to DRM and piracy follows:

* Gamers shall have the right to expect that games won?t install hidden drivers or other potentially harmful software without their consent.
* Gamers shall have the right to re-download the latest versions of the games they own at any time.
* Gamers shall have the right to not be treated as potential criminals by developers or publishers.
* Gamers shall have the right to demand that a single-player game not force them to be connected to the Internet every time they wish to play.
* Gamers shall have the right that games which are installed to the hard drive shall not require a CD/DVD to remain in the drive to play.

I am a proud owner of World of Goo on my Wii. It is a fantastic game and it truly deserves those twenty dollars.
But...does those factors really balance out? In my opinion the dynamic ip address factor weights a lot more than the others. I am not really convinced by that estimation.

I'm totally agree with you on the piracy.
For example, I've been using Total Command from the version 4, but only until version 7 that I had my own job and the very first software that I paid for was TC. It's simply because by using a software, I've increased my performance and earned more money. The amount that I paid for the license is much less that what I gained by using it.

As a user, I hate any software with a complicated activation process, especially Windows. Windows activation is always a nightmare for me.

I am a developer, and I always receive requirements from customer to provide the software with the best protection possible, even hardware lock, license dongle, web+phone activation, etc...

That harder the protection, the more interesting it is to crack it. My idea is to always a protection for your software, but with balance:
- You effort to maintain it.
- Additional system requirements caused by the protection.
- Registration easiness.

I completely disagree with enforcing hard protection like SafeDisc, DRM stuff that requires lots of money on develop and maintain the technology, lots of time for user support, lots of trouble for user and major victory for crackers.

In contrast, providing user with no information whether their software is licensed or not is not a good idea. A user who is willing to pay for your software may not always remember that he haven't paid. A user who still consider evaluating your software may not notice that he had not paid for it.

For those who really don't want to pay for it, they will never do. No matter how strong the protection is, how complicated the encryption is, your software will be cracked. Even in the best case, they simply doesn't use your software. But you should know that those who are willing to risk their computer by using a cracked version of software is those who really interested in warez, who love warez, who will provide his friends what is the best software for their needs.

Let say a geek want to use your software:
1. The protection is not too hard, still, he doesn't want to pay for it, so he get a crack and use it without a license. Still, you lose nothing. He then tells his friends that your software is excellent, and you have a strong, live advertisement channel without paying for it.
2. the protection is too hard, so he simply doesn't use your software. You gained nothing. He tells his friends that your software is crap, or at best really nice but "the registration process is a pain in the ass" and of course, he tell his friends to use another "not so nice" software but doesn't kick their ass. You're having one more anti-fan, who loses nothing to attack you, you're losing customers and your competitors are having a extra advertisement channel which should have been yours if your protection was not so hard.

I think 10% download/buy ratio is actually considered very very good in shareware business. In fact it is unbelievably good. I think even 2-3% is considered very good.
I have been in shareware business for over 10 years and actually I don't mind my software pirated. Of course it would be nice if everyone paid for it but in reality it is better if someome pirates your product instead of one of your competitors... ;) Everyone who is too greedy to accept that his software is pirated should stay out of the business, as anything that will be worth using will have key gens and serials postied in a few days after release.

Glad you recieved my letter. AFTER 32 FRIGGIN YEARS!

As an it professional working in it-security and it-forensic i can say, that there is no real way to protect a software.

You can make it harder using drm, hardware controlled drm, encryption ...

But... There are more people outside which enough time to hack the software and remove the protection as you think.

Each hour you spend in writing protection code for your application is worthless, because they have unlimited time to crack it.

The price for "world of goo" is more of fair. I still bought it, because i finished the demo. Nice game btw...

But... people don't want to spend money for the work of other people. Why paying 10 Cent, if you can get it somewhere for free?

I for myself choose the solution to pay for everything.

Would you rather have 90% of the copies of your game be pirated, and sell the other 10%; or have 0% piracy, and nobody buying it either?

/ proudly posted from a 100% pirated operating system and browser
// F/OSS FTW

The interesting thing here is that piracy rates seem constant. Both have almost no DRM, and a sample size of two is quite dodgy too. I'd be interested to see what piracy rates are like for well-protected AAA PC games.

I don't agree with you that all software will be pirated. partly because i learnt server-side programming before desktop programming and every app that i'm going to build will be validated/run from the server and hence it can't be pirated. Instead of saying 'your app will absolutely be pirated', i think you should be advocating SaaS instead.

Heh, I bought World of Goo at pre-release stage, and the funny thing is, I haven't played it yet. I do not regret the purchase, though. Sometimes, you have to vote with your wallet.

As a professional programmer, I decided years ago not to pirate software. I make my living at it. Is it really right for me to ask others to pay for my services and then turn around and steal others?

Like Jeff, I donate to software I like. Unlike Jeff, I don't give thousands of dollars away. I'm not that wealthy.

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

That's not entirely true ... There are several server emulators for World of Warcraft that allow one to host a private server. I would probably deem that as pirating, as you are playing the game against Blizzard's EULA.

World of Goo is really fun, when I saw they had a Mac and Linux versions as well it was a no-brainer, I had to support that. One thing I would recommend the developers is to drop the fixed price as well, let people pay as much as they can and/or think the game is worthy. I think they would be surprised with the amount of 3, 5 bucks transactions showing up, from people that otherwise wouldn't pay anything.

The fallacy here is that the claims of piracy are valid. Not a lot of data to back up their claims. Gates wrote the 90% figure based on what metric, exactly? Isn't that part of the allure of software engineering over code monkeyism: measurable results? Gates claimed 90% piracy, and now it's a truism.

The World of Goo gents claim 90% piracy, throw out a couple "But our numbers could be wrong" and yet the rest of this article keeps citing that 90% number. Remember kids, if you happened to load World of Goo on your laptop, anytime you happen to connect to a wifi hotspot, you could be contributing to their piracy numbers. Or if you've an ISP that recycles pooled addresses. Gosh, what would happen if you happened to use Tor to anonymize your traffic, wouldn't it be a shame to find out that you're contributing to piracy...er...piracy statistics?

I appreciate the conclusions of the article suggesting high quality for fair prices. And I applaud anyone that's willing to go the open source route.

I do think the article took the wrong path in getting to that conclusion, though.

There was an interesting editorial about DRM at Eurogamer recently.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/hated-and-broken-article

Worth reading.

Exactly. My ISP changes my IP every 24 hours. If I buy World of Goo and then play it over 15 days, their system will record 15 different IP addresses. That 90% estimate is complete rubbish and should be ignored, not repeated.

One reason (obviously not the only reason) is that the Pirate Bay is so convenient. Imaging a database of all the software in the world, with a simple search interface and and Amazon-like interface (customer reviews and a one-click download) and you're pretty close to the Pirate Bay. No more trawling the net to find little indie developers' websites, almost never any hassle from DRM. There are many people who would be driven to piracy by this convenience alone.

Anyone who thinks 90% is an unrealistic number needs to consider PKZIP and WINZIP. It was easier to find the Holy Grail than to find a purchased copy of either.

Wow. That game is great.

I cannot believe that we're still faced with DRM, especially with recent controversies.

As this is probably an American-centric Blog most people would not know of this, but during the release of Football Manager 2009 the thousands of people that bought the game could not finish installing it. This year the developers used DRM to lock users' down where the software required the user to use a code provided with his/her game to log onto the DRM server and unlock it.

The problem, naturally, is that Football Manager is a huge game in Europe, and the developers didn't anticipate the amount of people that would either pre-order or purchase it on the day of release. Thanks to this, the DRM server was trashed, the phone lines were clogged and eventually closed and their entire website (even Sega Europe) was dead. After a full day I was lucky enough to find a patch the developers had been torrenting to fix the issues, whilst thousands more casual users either returned their games or kept plugging away for answers for days.

Ironically, those that pirated the game were able to play it two days before those that played it.

Jeff -

You should print the whole letter. It's worth reading.

I kicked myself for accepting a bundle of "Microsoft" compilers when I bought a Kaypro II circa 1983. I had time to rewrite the disk de-blocking software, but not the compilers. A home system.

You write:

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

I'll add a third entry:

3. Make it more convenient to buy than to steal
4. Provide instant gratification

About convenience:

Pirated media is not free to the pirate. He pays with his time. Now you can't compete with the price of time for people who don't work. To most teenagers, time is way less valuable than money. No matter how convenient you make buying your stuff, these people won't give you their money. However, that is not the case for people who have jobs. To people like us, even finding a working torrent file may not be worth the hassle if we can instead open the Amazon MP3 store, type the name of the song we want and click "buy".

In many cases, the price doesn't even enter the equation. To me, whether I have ten bucks more or less on my credit card statement at the end of the month simply doesn't matter at all. What matters is whether I spend ten minutes looking for a song, or ten seconds.

Ironically, DRM makes it *less* convenient to buy, thus giving potential customers more incentive to pirate.

About instant gratification:

If possible, allow users to download whatever you're selling. Don't make them wait for the Amazon package to arrive if you can avoid it. Give them a file they can download right after clicking "buy", and don't make them pay additionally for the privilege.

As a user of Steam, I wonder if titles released exclusively through that platform are pirated less than other games. Especially the casual and/or under-$20 games. The reason is that Steam is very user-friendly, thereby making the barrier to purchase incredibly low.

If you account the exchange rate on World of Goo, it would cost almost half the minimum wage of my country. If in their figures they count only the target market of their sales (North America/Europe) I wonder how much the piracy estimate would be. My guess is 50%, which still is heck lot high.

It's fine to buy software so long as you demand that the license is GPLv3 or similar, for your own and everyone's sake.

Without piracy theres no successful software. Without successful software theres no money. Without money there's no business.

Piracy is a fact of life in software business. Microsoft, Symantec, Autodesk,..., and the worlds greatest software companies have piracy based business models. So don't worry if your software has been pirated, worry if it don't.

(i'm no english native speaker so excuse my orthography).

Re: Mike

This is ultimately the case: the <B>only</B> people who are ever hurt by DRM are the legitimate users.

Piracy isn't right; but screwing over your customers isn't either.

In other news, I do hope that <I>World of Goo</I> gets ported to Linux like I keep hearing that it will. Everyone I talk to who has played it really seems to like it.

sep322: I think you hit the nail in the head! Exactly - just search for a title, click download, wait few hours, and have it with no DRM, no system services running all time to protect a software you use once in a week... no registration, no mail confirmation, no spammy newsletters, and you can be sure that the software will function even when evil overlords shut down their DRM system.

Steam? Almost, just remove 90% of its code, remove all the installed services, autoruns, ads, junk code that does *something* all the time in the background, and give me some warranty that my purchased software will run even after Steams shuts down. Less is more, get it, Valve?

Jeff, just to let you know, I bought the World of Goo after reading this post, and I love it.

The new Prince of Persia game is also free from copy protection. I might buy it. This is quite a surprising move from a company like Ubisoft although writers at Ars Technica [1] suspect that they only did this to watch it being pirated and come up with "told you so". I hope they are smarter than that...

Also I actively boycott any game with heavy DRM. Especially when it limits the times I can install it, most of which are EA games like Spore, NFS Undercover and Red Alert 3 (though these games are a bad example since I wouldn't buy them anyway because of the poor quality... so I don't pirate them too).

[1] https://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081212-pc-prince-of-persia-contains-no-drm-its-a-trap.html

Jeff,

Given your views on this issues, I wonder why you don't have an optional monthly donation service on Stackoverflow?

I'd personally give you ?5-10 a month for a reduced number of ads.

I subscribed to Slashdot for _years_ to support their efforts.

Not all of us are take, take, take. With the economy tanking, I wonder if you'll suffer from a loss of ad revenue that could compromise the project.

The ad model shouldn't be the only way to support a web-site.

https://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html has a really good (but VERY long) essay on piracy. On page 4, it has a number of sources indicating that the world piracy rate tends to be around 30-60% (a very wide range since it's so hard to measure accurately). World of Goo is somewhat exceptional in the 90% rate.

That last line will get quoted out of context somewhere.

Goodness of the human spirit? Heh. Good one.

I think the best morality to aim for is balance. Not going overboard with copy protection, but not neglecting it. Not going overboard into open source anarchy land, but not going overboard with cheap/expensive pricing either. Finding that 'just right' area is about all you can do.

Nothing against open source, of course. Just some people have to eat I'm afraid.

I take it as a credit to the free world that anything at all can be readily had with only some smarts, and no more. In fact, it is a resounding affirmation of the human spirit that we are not readily intimidated by allegations that their time is always and ultimately worth more than ours. If they want 100%.. equity??.. maybe they should start drilling for oil.

If you target you product for a target audience with little money, you shouldn't be surprised that people are hesitant to throw out that little money they have. Taking the kids pocket money, that is just mean.

(This comment is oversimplified to make a point)

@DW

Some of us believe that developing software is a service, rather than think of software as a manufactured product.

I am a software engineer by trade. I am not paid by my employer per line or per unit or per program or per product. I am on salary to produce software for them, and by the nature of my industry, all source code is part of a contract deliverable.

I understand that this model does not work for independent software developers quite as conveniently, but it was guys like Gates that convinced the world that software was a manufactured good, and coincidentally, it was the windows platform that centered around the ideas like DRM. It was an easy argument for a culture that believed that as long as they wrote something, it would be purchased based on intrinsic value.

Note that shareware did not extend far outside of the microsoft model. MacOS had some. Even Linux saw a bit here and there. But Apple got in the business of "We'll give you everything you need.", which covered a lot of users in a free-to-use model (yes, plenty of commercial proprietary software there. Probably some piracy, but how to measure it?) and the F/OSS crowd in Linux said "Yeah, we've got commercial software too, but chances are good that someone's going to write something that's nearly as good, in some cases better, and give it away. So you'd best think of what you have to offer above and beyond software as the end-all/be-all."

I do not condone copyright infringement, be it media works of art or artifact. But my sympathy doesn't extend to anyone that isn't flexible if the world changes around them.

Adapt or die.

I just don't bother downloading anything that's shareware or demo & look for a free alternative instead.

A for Anything - Damon Knight
https://www.geocities.com/fantasticreviews/a_for_anything.htm

The Gismo makes a good metaphor for Walmart, software piracy, offshoring, and many other social ills.

Thanks for the article, it was a good read.

I've seen a lot of these arguments now applied to the record business. I remember when NIN released a series of records DRM free a year or so ago (i think it was called Ghosts?). People were falling over themselves with gushing and praise for the delivery method but the music was not worthy of buying. Some were claiming we should buy the record to "reward" NIN for being so hip. I heard similar things of Radiohead's internet release.

I think this goes to something deeper. Why should I donate to a political campaign if I can be part of it with out giving? Or a church? Or a shareware?

Maybe I am missing something here but if developers want to make their software pirate proof, why don't they maintain a database of serial numbers. Each one of them can only be used once and the product has to call home to that database of keys to be activated. I guess that would be something similar to when Microsoft implemented the WPA. There has to be a way to make it uncrackable too.

Exactly.

Why NOT shop at Walmart? It's not my job that's been marginalized or sent to China, and look at these low, low prices!

I prefer to pay when I have to spend too much time pirating.

iTunes, Steam, are a great incentive against piracy because I can attach my property to my online profile. Steam provides additional services that I can only access if I have an account.
Paypal helps a lot too, it makes it possible to buy easily in seconds.

World of Warcraft only uses the server to create a multplayer environment and provide on-demand the scripted logic for the high level bosses.

Software authors should check serial/crack sites and re-release a new version often to suppress the available crack/serial.

Why do you repeat such bogus claims about piracy??

I can't imagine how a programmer could figure two utter unknowns should be assumed to be approximately equal!

Furthermore, there is another category of people who will rack up multiple IP's: Those who travel and have it on a laptop.

If they actually want to learn something about piracy they should have sent some machine signature info.

Furthermore, as others have pointed out a lot of piracy is by those who never would have bought the product anyway--either because they simply don't have the money or because they need to make a little use of something that's not little. (I'm thinking mostly of people who use an expensive package at work and want to make one thing with it at home. Is someone like this going to buy Autocad to make one drawing? Sure, there are cheaper equivalents but if they have learning curves. Given the option, such a person is likely to use a pirate copy of the product they know.)

As far as I'm concerned a pirate copy means nothing unless the person has the money to buy the product and doing so isn't obviously nuts.

complaining about piracy gets you nowhere. like you said, it will happen. this is obviously something that is part of our current culture, and we must accept it; unless you want to concede more rights and let the government control hardware and software.

perhaps people just feel $20, or $15 is too much? what if he had charged $5 instead? he would only have to break the 40% piracy rate to make more money. so the question is, would 30%+ more people buy a game if it was $5? if you think I'm crazy, look up the iPhone fart app (as my basis for cheap or micro charging).

again, whining about piracy gets you? n o w h e r e.

Exorbitant Adobe software? Bunk. For the amount of honest-to-God innovation and human hours that go into designing, creating, and testing the Suites, the prices they charge are a bargain. In fact, that flippant comment undermines your own argument; Adobe helps people create art that's never before been possible. Surely the tools of one's trade are worth a couple hundred bucks.

"Myth: stealing cable is wrong. Fact: Cable companies are large, faceless corporations, which makes it okay." - Homer Simpson

It seems to me that the only real effective way of dealing with piracy is through the use of server side inducements. For example, World of Goo could have restricted it to one name per purchase on their online leaderboards. That would mean, if someone wanted just to play the game for fun, they would be able to pirate it without anyone stopping them but if they wanted their name to be preserved for posterity, they need to pony up the additional money for a license.

Your software is being "pirated"? Gee, say thanks! Being copied illegally (which is incidentally the right term for this, "piracy" is something else) means that your software doesn't suck and it's worth copying illegally, and it's getting some free publicity. It also means that in *most* people's minds your software is *not* worth US$20. It's a pretty darn big hint that you should lower what you charge for your software. Get over the whole "piracy" soap opera already...

This is the reason why some of us have given up on charging for software altogether. I *am* a programmer and I make a living out of it, I charge for programming services, not for programs. You just have to face the hard cold fact that the modern society doesn't see a value in software anymore (if it ever did).

When playing the demo you have the option to submit the score as well (world of goo). I hope they only looked at scores submitted by none demo versions. if there is no way to see that than the must count only the submissions from the levels not found in the demo.

Jeff, at least you were honest about stealing software in the old days. Just how that is supposed to discourage others from piracy is beyond me. It is like the parents who tell war stories about drinking in college or high school and then telling their kids not to drink.

This post might have well not have been written. It is useless except as a vehicle to get people posting here and traffic driven to your website.

Next week we can argue about abortion or religion. It is just as useful...

It's a known fact that without piracy, Windows would have never become popular. Piracy is flattering and indirect way of viral marketing.

Another good example of this is when Sony entered the console market... their Playstation 1 was cracked within no-time and helped gaining Sony's platform popularity and following: people that would also buy the next-gen. Same goes for the xbox. Do you really believe they couldn't have made it more difficult to crack? I think they're made intentionally... crackable. In fact, if you look at the console market, all really hard to crack consoles had a harder time surviving (or completely died).

I used alot of pirated software in the past, but notice now that I'm earning money, that I'm buying more and more from the smaller developers. 500 euro for a MS office is still a rip-off, same goes for Photoshop. If they'd price it <200, I'd happily buy them.

I'm surprised you didn't mention the option of writing a client-side game hosted on the web and making money through advertising, as you illustrated here: https://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000872.html

I agree with everyone who posts about excessively annoying DRM and license protection. I recently had to re-install some commercial electronic-lock programming software (It's essentially a front-end to a SQL db for logical access control). It took me two weeks to get the developer to explain how to get the hardware dongle working. I'm relatively certain that I could have found a crack for the software in a matter of minutes, had I not had a need for "legit" software. Now I have a USB port permanently occupied by a useless dongle. Boo!

For my money, the least end-user-abusive DRM I ever saw was a game called "Alone in the Dark" circa about 1995. There was a smallish (2" by 2") book with about 100 pages of pale-yellow-ink printed key codes. The codes were too pale to be copied by a photocopier, and even if you got that to work, there were still 100+ pages (duplex) to copy. Each time the game started, it displayed a page number, and required the player to enter the key-code from that page.

Finally, a slight digression, but am I the only one who's sick of seeing those PSAs at the beginning of DVDs warning against piracy? It makes no sense, I paid for the DVD, and if I were to pirate it, I wouldn't sacrifice quality for that "Extra" PSA, meaning a pirated copy wouldn't include the PSA. Hey MPAA, please don't punish those who buy movies by treating them like pirates!

The guys from USB overdrive have an interesting way to "deal" with the piracy.
https://www.faskil.com/images/geekzone/codersgu6.jpg

"Now, it's up to you to prove me right and revive my waning belief in the essential goodness of the human spirit by buying a copy of World of Goo."

Or even better, just buy the next program you would have otherwise pirated.

The World Of Goo thing is a publicity stunt - don't make them rich because of it.

Boo fucking hoo.

Isn't "open-source business model" a bit like "congressional ethics"? People talk about it a lot, but I've never seen any such thing.

The problem is not that people are pirating software, it's that the software industry's monetizing model is based on the old one created for physical objects:

Money = Virtual Power
Trade Money for Object X

In order to stop piracy, companies need to adapt to it. As you said, piracy will not stop. So why not adapt, which as humans we have done for eons.

Look at Blizzard with WoW, look at all of the online services running on ad revenue. They are raking in the cash, without the threat of piracy!

These arnt the best answers, but I'm sure there are far better ones yet undiscovered. We need to stop focusing on the stoping piracy and start figuring out ways to remove its need, ways that are good for the user and good for the developer.

"Isn't 'open-source business model' a bit like "congressional ethics"? People talk about it a lot, but I've never seen any such thing.
Chuck on December 27, 2008 10:07 AM"

@Chuck:

https://www.thevarguy.com/2007/12/17/10-open-source-companies-set-to-dominate-2008/

There are many, you just have to get out of your seat and look.

I've found my Firefox extensions (that are on addons.mozilla) on various crack sites. That was amusing.

@Sam: "Maybe I am missing something here but if developers want to make their software pirate proof, why don't they maintain a database of serial numbers. Each one of them can only be used once and the product has to call home to that database of keys to be activated."

Simple. You patch the .exe at the assembly level, so that if(server_said_its_legal) turns into if(!server_said_its_legal), or you add a jump at the beginning that skips all the "call home" code.

@Tim:
"This post might have well not have been written. It is useless except as a vehicle to get people posting here and traffic driven to your website."

I'm not so sure - it gave me information about a cool new game I hadn't heard of that I just bought a copy of. So have a few other correspondents above. A small strike for a small software company, I'd say, and an enjoyable game playing session to boot.

People like screaming DRM all around, many of those forget that Steam is also DRM. I like to call Steam as: "DRM that works" (in favor of users not against them). Yet the whole Steam is also built to suck every last penny of the customers as possible like Jeff said in a previous entry.

Three things:

1. Simple software protection (enter a 20 digit code, lock it against some feature of your computer by an activation process) does work to prevent casual piracy. It doesn't prevent all piracy, but it does prevent most (even when there is some crack program available over bit torrent -- most casual users don't have the time.)

2. The higher the price of the software, the more likely people are to try to crack it.

3. In days past it was true that teenagers had more time than money so they could spend their time cracking. Today however, via sites like guru.com and rentacoder.com it is possible for them to monetize that time and do something more productive with their lives. That is something that needs to get out there.

Equating "copying" with "piracy" is in itself propaganda for the most fundamentalist form of copyright protection and extortion.

I'll support the programmer if the programmer supports me, ie, i'll pay if I get access to and the freedom to use the source code. Otherwise, try choosing a different business model than the one invented by the major corporations that can afford the extortion and intimidation tactics that are needed to support it.

And if you are a "tiny 2 man independent programming shop" using that business model in the 21st century is just as insane as trying to invade another country with 2 guys and a bb-gun.

There is no "fair price" for screwing your customers (although the iPhone Apps store's "so low you don't care about getting screwed anymore" prices come close), unless maybe if you start calling it what it actually is: renting services instead of "buying software", the latter being the big stinking lie of the copyright era (which future generations will probably refer to as the second dark ages).

Why not just accept reality? If you want to make money off of applied mathematics, then you better make a product attached to a subscription service.

If I want to buy a car, do I buy a license to the styling or engineering of the car? No, I buy an inefficient piece of metal. Since CDs are worthless, and processing cycles on a server less so, software producers should restyle themselves as a part of the service industry. e.g., subscription providers.

Apple Computer (not the only company) made billions of dollars selling computer hardware. The fact that everyone had access to a giant pirated library of software helped sell more units.

It isn't/wasn't in their interest to develop any sort of strategy to combat pirating as it would only serve to reduce their hardware sales.

I see only two ways to really reduce this problem. Neither is perfect.

1. Utilize private/public encryption key technology at the microprocessor level and have software producers encrypt custom binary images for every package sold.

or

2. Accept the fact that at current prices people aren't willing (or 90% aren't) to buy your product and reduce your prices AND add value to the sale.

How do you add value? Lots of ways. Regular updates with new features and bug fixes, forum access where customers can talk to the developers. Being responsive to their needs.

Never played Goo World, never will. But what would players enjoy? New Goo worlds, Goo levels, Goo things? Once a month updates to keep peoples interest and keep things from getting stale. Updates that only registered users can download, of course.

In a way we have created a very strange industry. I'm not talking about just software development, but the market as a whole.

"The market" has decided to punish legal users; you know the ones who actually buy the stuff, with higher fee's to subsidize the people who are stealing the product. But every time they raise prices they drive more people to steal their product.

Then they create advertisements teaching people that you CAN actually steal their stuff. Every time I see a satellite pirating commercial I wonder how many people decided at that moment to go out and buy an illegal unit.

The online guys have it figured out though. You aren?t going to be playing WoW or downloading free stuff from iTunes without being legal?..

@lowrads: when you buy a car, you *are* covering the costs from engineering...

Software is a service only if you are writing software for a single entity. As soon as you start writing software for public consumption, you either are giving it away, or you are selling it. If you want to give it away, that's great. If not, and someone copies it without paying you, that's piracy.

Having been a game developer in an earlier life, I know that piracy is an unfortunate fact of life. The real tragedy, however, comes when a developer can no longer continue to produce popular software because everyone steals it instead of paying for it. Eventually, creative computer gaming is gone and all we are left with is console crap.

speaking of world of goo, which i have wanted to purchase for a long time now, which version is preferrable--the wii version or the pc version? i'm wondering if using the wiimote would be more difficult than the mouse.

It is true that not everybody who steals another person's software would have purchased it anyway, but it's still theft. Not theft of money, but theft of the creator's right to choose what he or she does with his creation.

In this case, when people pirate World of Goo they're not taking 20 bucks away from 2D Boy, they're taking away 2D Boy's right to choose what they want to do with their own work. Instead of meeting their terms (just $20, even), they're basically telling the developer they can't and shouldn't have a say in how the game is used. Some may say that that's not a big deal, but this type of theft can't work. If software developers are going to be able to afford to develop software, they need to be able to control what is done with their software. Charge $20, charge $1,000,000, or charge $0 and put it under the GPL... it has to be their choice. Our only choice as customers are to accept their terms or move on.

If people don't like what is happening to 2D Boy and World of Goo, I have another suggestion than just buying a copy of the game: Make a personal commitment not to steal software. You can't change other people's minds, but you can control what you do.

you sound like you are being honest now with buying software which is a good thing but by your own admission you did a lot of pirating as a kid.

this is a perfect example of "what goes around comes around." what's happening is perfectly fair in your case, isn't it?

nick

I think the general sentiment here is about the same as mine. When publishers stop infesting the games (and software) with stupid DRM - which is circumvented by Copyright Violators almost immediately - then the illegal versions of games will become less necessary.

As it is, I see little reason to buy new titles. That new Prince of Persia sounds interesting (even MORE so since there is no cripple-ware DRM embedded in it).
Short of that, I can sum up the game publishers problems in a simple sentence: Stop treating honest customers as criminals, and stop trying to blame unsuccessful junk that doesn't sell as "criminally replicated".

Unless all Altair owners were using Micro-Soft's BASIC, then a claim of 90% piracy of Micro-Soft BASIC is unwarranted.

Back when I sold software (StatView, $500 stats program), we had a saying: "We rather the user stole our software then our competitor's." We figured our user base was actually 3x the number of sold copies, and those stolen copies were in our camp rather than the competition.

Many of the illegal copies will convert. We found conversion happened when OS update broke old software. Mac System 9.0 broke our 1986 version of StatView and resulted in a very nice quarter.

With all that said, server based software is the only way to go today. You get revenue from the leeches, and software updates are painless. Plus you get ironclad user counts and can track how the users access the software, allowing focused development on what people actually use.

@NM, Mike Hussein Cohen, Duh:
You guys are what normal people call, "freetards."
Your ignorance is just unbelievable. How does supporting users equate giving you the source code?
Stallman has spoiled many, many kids.

Why World of Goo lets you submit highscores when it feels such a high percentage is pirated is beyond me.

You just have to be smarter. Take Apple & iTunes for example. They made it easier to purchase a song for $1.50 than to find it, rip it and then download it.

I don't see a problem in a $20 game "calling home" (checking against a server) every time you run it to verify you are a valid user.

As a 20 year old disability pensioner, I've never worked. My first and current income is this pension, and it is below the relative poverty line in my country. I have a budget for mind blowing software, but it is unfortunately very small. When emailed the World of Goo guys praising their fantastic game and asking if they could provide some discount or means of donation, they refused. They wanted me to keep my money... Nice guys. One day I'll be able to afford stuff like this, but till then i'll have to go forth pirating the majority of my software, and using specially discounted or free licenses in most of the rest.

One big moral I have is that any time I do pirate something, I need to ensure it doesn't cost the developer anything. That means never using support, never downloading related stuff from their site. I think the moment I cost them something, it changes from sharing to some kind of stealing.

I suspect sometimes an honest unpaid user is worth something special to indie developers too. A story of struggle, and an expression of love for their software. Completely aside from that, I have friends who do have money, and sometimes my positive recommendations cause them to buy apps too. If piracy costs nothing and helps sell more copies to those who can and would pay, well, that sure is a great ideal. :)

I couldn't agree more with you (and I write and sell software myself). Perhaps it's a human tendency not only to get something for free if you can, but also (on the other side) to endlessly fret about being ripped off or having stuff stolen.

Dudes, if you are making a decent amount from your software/game, don't cripple it or penalize the honest user in a vain attempt to stop a few people from getting it for free. It's the honest users you should care about. The pirates can get stuffed - quite often they aren't serious users anyway, but just stealing the product to demonstrate that they can.

Great game. Just downloaded it from the torrents... why on earth would anyone pay for a game?

Do you people feel guilty when you walk past a street busker and enjoy the music without paying for it?

Someone mentioned that people pirate software because they don't think it's worth its price. Problem is, those people are used to getting their software for free, so there's really no way to compete. Free will always be cheaper. I know, I've been there too,. Well, the empty floppies and tapes did cost a few bucks, even back then...

I think the moral dilemma is that if a physical item is too expensive I *have* to chose an alternative item, or not get it at all (or save up), since stealing a physical item would be "more illegal" than to pirate software to most people. With software there's always the free alternative, so you don't really have to boycott the price/packaging by choosing a cheaper competitor. You can just use the *best* one without paying.

In the end I follow Jeff's advice and pay for the software I use. Commercial and Shareware. The fact that people have paid for my software over the years has given more than 300 people their jobs and income.

And to counter the open-source debate. Not all software requires maintenance or support that one could charge for, and developers need their wages just like everyone else. And not all software is simple enough that it can be assembled in one's spare time, as Shareware.

My Dad used to tell me that everyone has their price. Obviously for people like Wally, the price of their integrity is only $20.
I can undertand stealing food if you're hungry but stealing a *game* ?

I always found that quote of Bill Gates amusing.

The richest man in the world (well, sometimes) complaining about not making enough money from his software.

Could someone please post a link where I can get a free copy?

Jeff, great article! Regardless of what some comments said - it is an interesting and valuable read (especially for developers/designers/publishers)

Just a thought: I think that it is not possible to discuss piracy and bundle applications like Adobe Suite , etc with the general usage (i.e., games) applications in the same argument.

Apps like Adobe Photoshop, Apple's Final Cut Studio, and alike are Pro Tools and designed for professionals that make money with the help of these apps. The cost of these applications is bargain for any professional using them. I, for example, never met any pro graphic or video designer who would question Photoshop's $699 or Final Cut Studio's $1,299 price tag. Within a few days of usage these applications become "free and paid for". And I believe this would be applicable to majority of pro-tools used by pro-users.

I completely agree with comment by Bruce Bullis (above) that amount of innovations, engineering hours, r&d, etc that went into designing such tools are simply so staggering that their prices are bargain to say the list! Should applications like such be protected - I do believe that they should. A pro-user, would be OK (I think) with what ever licensing/activation process company would through at him/her. Should such process be as painless as possible - of course! But it is a very fine line between strong protection and licensing and "one-click-and-go" activation process. Having used quite a lot of pro-tools myself - I have not found even one application that would force me into an "unbearable" activation process.

Also, one thing to keep in mind: usually licensing and activation processes have very very short life cycle. The process initiated at some point of app installation and usually never needs to be re-done again. Of course I am talking about pro-user where workstations are not being changed in a weekly bases and apps do not require to be reinstalled over and over...

General usage apps (especially games) - well... there is a different story. Of course, game developers (I do believe) should protect and license their intellectual property as well. At the end of the day this is their bread-and-butter. However, different rules, approaches, etc should probably be applied to their product as their user-base quite different from the pro-users using pro-tools.

I do not want the following to sound like a shameless plug (mentioning here to illustrate the point). I have not met a single software company that designs and sells commercial software and would not care about implementing licensing and protection into their application. I work for jProdctivity, a company that develops and sells licensing toolkit called Protection! This toolkit is designed for software developers/publishers that would like to add licensing and protection into their application. I had numerous situations where in talking to our customers (current or perspective) we are trying to "calm down" their urge to protect their application so tight that their paying customers will suffer.

The bottom line: Developers/Publishers need to protect their software. Their licensing plan needs to minimize casual "soft piracy" and prevent people from passing their software around to friends, family, and coworkers. And it needs to lock out the serious piracy that involves running key generators and passing around stolen unlock codes. Even if developer offer a free application, it is worthwhile to license its use. Licensing freeware lets such developer keep track of users, and build a valuable "house list" that can be used to offer upgrades to the paid versions of software.

Software licensing and protection are not just ideas to consider as someday/maybe tasks. Protecting your software is crucial to protecting your income stream.

Assuming "the other 90% had pirated" Altair BASIC is incorrect.

First, the Altair came with 256 bytes of RAM (yes, *bytes*, not KB or MB). It was typical to add RAM in increments of 1/4 KB or 1KB at that time. Most users did not have the 4KB minimum required to run BASIC.
(For youngsters who are used to 3MB "Hello, world" programs, I am *NOT* making this up.)

Second, it was common to program the Altair in assembly -- many didn't even care about BASIC.

Third, there was at least one competing BASIC at that time, called SCELBAL.

Fourth, while club members did, in some cases, receive pirated paper tapes of Bill's BASIC that were handed out, many of those never owned an Altair and could not run it, and thus would never have been in the market for it (there were already many other microcomputers available at the time of the letter, most incompatible with Altairs).

Last, but not least, a lot of the earliest Altair purchasers never got the machine to work. The numerous ones built from kits were particularly problematic.

It's also worth noting that Bill was greatly exaggerating the incidence of piracy. Users at that time were scattered all over the country, and had no way of sharing software, or even finding one another. While it's true that some club members shared freely, there were very few clubs, representing a small fraction of the total users. Bill was whining, pure and simple. IMHO, it was this early perceived slight that justified in Bill's mind the unethical robber-baron tactics he used the rest of his career, to amass billions.

I was an Altair user, and I used Bill's BASIC, purchased legitimately. I've followed Bill's exploits from the very beginning. I admired him then; now I think he's spawn of the devil.

Maybe they're charging too much for the game?

What if they charged 80% of what they're charging now? Maybe they reverse the piracy rate and make more money.

Business model is probably at fault. Might be better to give away the product and charge for posting scores online. People are only going to pay for the product once but will want to post scores repeatedly.

It doesn't help to discuss the issue by using terms that equate ?copyright infringement? with the very real violence and material theft done by pirates. They are entirely different offenses, and to smear the former with the hysterical terminology of Bill Gates's 1976 letter is a huge obstace to discussing the issue.

> 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.

I'd say it's even simpler only one thing to do, and (even easier) things to *not* do:

1. Sell your wares to customers.
2. Stop trying to treat your customers like criminals.
3. Stop trying to control what people do with what they bought from you.

I just did the first chapter of WOG and I have no idea what you guys are on. It seems a bit like lemmings, and sure it has some nice physics but I feel no compulsion go any further. Are my standards too high?

1) most software/games out there are crap
2) if you use SOFTWARE (not games) for your own education, there is nothing you can't do with open-source/freeware
3) companies should pay for the software they use
4) if your GAME has an estimated gaming experience of under 720 hours (because it doesn't support multiplayer/online/"free gaming") there is no sense in paying for it; if the demo you release is 10% of the game, it don't deserve the buy

there are games worth buying; in my experience, only blizzard delivers that, if you cannot match that standard, don't cry

I'd happily buy WoGoo but it comes with this "steam" product that I am not really keen on. I guess I'll run it in a virtual machine and find out just how awful it is, but from what I hear it's not something I'd recommend to anyone.

One thing I'd add to the above "how to play nice" is to honour your own fscking contract. If you say "free upgrades for life" don't then turn round a year later and say "we want more of your money so we're weaselling out of it"[1]. Especially don't follow it up by closing your user forums when it turns out that users don't like it. BreezeSys sold a lot of copies of other image editors when they pulled that stupid stunt.

I'm a little over games that suck resources for no good reason. If you don't need 3D acceleration, don't write code that demands it. Allow users to turn down the frills and make the game actually work when they do. I have Civ4 and it's a dog even on a fast machine because some idiot decided that scrolling should always be slow (presumably so it looks pretty). As a result it's a very frustrating game to play. I'm back to playing c-evo because it's nice and snappy. Also free (and Stefan doesn't accept donations!)

[1] the freely upgraded product is now "legacy" and updates are much delayed... my camera is two years old and only recently supported. The upgrade to the "pro" version was not free and would cost me my lifetime support.

for a free copy type into google "world of goo torrent"

Remember - It's only stealing if you get caught.

I break the law every day in one way or another. It is the way the system works.

The only way Bill Gates made all his money was by giving his software away for free. The more people that download this game the more popular it will become, then more people will buy it.

I never pay for software for myself but I have walked out of contracts where the clients used pirated software and had no intention of paying for it.

The whole "DRM causes piracy" argument is crap. DRM is a reaction to piracy. Companies wouldn't wear the engineering cost of adding DRM to a software title, and the decreased user experience if they didn't believe it was necessary.

What do you think happened exactly? A bunch of EA execs were freebasing on designer drugs one day and decided "hey, lets make our software harder to install and use, and burn a bunch of engineering time doing it just for shits and giggles" and then the next day some white-knight hackers came along to save the world from this horrible inconvenience? Crap. If you're downloading and using software that you didn't pay for but you should have then it's stealing, no matter how you try to justify it. If enough people keep doing it eventually companies will stop making games.

@Moz
You can grab it from various places, not just Steam. They offer it through their site as well as through Steam, Direct2Drive, Beanstalk, Greenhouse, and Impulse.

I didn't really enjoy the game and certainly not at that price point.

> If you're downloading and using software that you didn't pay for but you should have then it's stealing

That's a circular argument, because you define the act as something that should not be done ? you start by assuming the conclusion.

If you want to claim that something ?should? be done, you need to show why. (No, merely pointing at the law is not helpful; the morality of an act is not determined by what the law has to say about it.)

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

3. Use a convenient payment method.

Applicable primarily for online software sales, but if it's fairly priced, I will buy it, but only if the website supports my preferred method of payment, and the process is painless. Some people only use paypal, others only use credit cards, etc. Snail mail payment and software receival is a quick route to having your software pirated. A convenient, painless, payment and delivery process is important when I consider buying a piece of software online.

Can you really buy software? I have always been under the impression that you can only buy a license for its use.

Jesus was first pirate, has to be said.

Just bought World of Goo because of this article. Works great under Wine on Ubuntu 8.10. They are working on a Linux release also, and you get it for free if you buy it from 2dboy.com

I used to pirate a lot of games. These days, I only pirate games I can't buy new.

There are some products I avoid because I can't afford them (Microsoft Office) or don't like their DRM (Spore, although I picked it up over Steam during the current Holiday Sale).

Hmm, my workplace has one of those "Home program" deals with Microsoft, so I suppose I could get MS Office if I wanted to.

Am I the only one who noticed that the 'factors' Jeff lists are completely backward. Users having a dynamic IP address would make the piracy rate HIGHER and people opting out of submitting there scores would make it LOWER. Come on guys, I thought you programmers were a bit better at math than this.

I love games built with love.

It seems like too many are about rehashing success patterns.

A great game is when a unique dream gets unleashed and shared with bazillions of people.

Speaking of pirating software, not contributing to open-source/free projects that you use and depend on, is just as bad IMO. I encourage anyone that uses Wikipedia (I know I use it daily) to donate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/

I just bought World of Goo because it looks super cool, but they're going to see at least 5 different IPs from this one purchase:
1) I just bought this at my in-laws house (that'll be the IP of record)
2) I use Sprint PCS data for my laptop, which of course uses dynamic IPs.
3) My home cable IP (dynamic IP).
4) My office cable account (static IP).
5) I frequent a coffee shop next to my office.

I recognize that my case is maybe on the far side of the curve, but I'm thinking their piracy numbers are REALLY inflated.

>> If you're downloading and using software that you didn't pay for but you should have then it's stealing

>That's a circular argument, because you define the act as something that should not be done ? you start by assuming the conclusion.

It's not a circular argument; it's a statement identifying a particular action -- downloading and using software that you didn't pay for but should have -- as stealing. I didn't write the statement, but I think it's pretty clear that the "but you should have" part is pointing at the fact that an individual or organization *owns* the software in question. I'd say it's owned *legally* because the government recognizes the creator's right to control the distribution of that software (copyright), and owned *morally* because the creator of the software (or book, song, etc.) must be able to own the products of his own work if he is to survive, let alone live a happy and full life.

>Speaking of pirating software, not contributing to open-source/free projects that you use and depend on, is just as bad IMO. I encourage anyone that uses Wikipedia (I know I use it daily) to donate.

I think there is one fundamental difference: Pirating someone's software breaks the terms that the owner set for use of his software, but using open-source projects without contribution to the author does not.

uh, yeah, just bought on Steam and as far as I can tell it goes against everything you just said in this column.

It's pretty simple, if you pirate, you're a dick. Anyone saying otherwise is simply trying to justify themselves out of being a dick, because THEY can't POSSIBLY be "that guy".

News flash to pirates, you are that guy :)

And for simplicity sake, I'm speaking about the person who doesn't spend a dime toward a program that specifically says you have to pay for it, not those who crack their games after they've bought them or re-download because they lost their CD.

Man, this post couldn't have dropped at a more appropriate time in my life. I just release my first "for sale" piece of software two weeks ago, and it's already been cracked and is making the rounds on the 'tubes.

Part of me is flattered - I'm worthy of being pirated. The rest of me is pissed. This is not something I squirted out over the weekend. This is something that I have labored over for years, and now some turd is out there giving it out for free.

Cybercat hit it right. If you're a pirate, you're a dick.

You wouldn't steal a lawnmower from the John Deere dealership when you need to mow your lawn, would you?

I agree with your stance. I always support small-time programmers like these. I do not pirate from them; I feel a little guilt when it happens. On the other hand, Microsoft or the movie industry simply do not strike up the same amount of guilt: they churn out products like nobody's business, and I therefore do not feel anything as they are copied and pirated.

Hi Jeff,

thanks for writing about this, because it's near and dear to my heart as a software developer: https://dlinsin.blogspot.com/2008/05/paying-for-software.html.

"buying software supports programmers" is exactly how programmers should think, because it's our business which is being harmed when you download something pirated! Stealing from each other is only harming ourselves!

The other side of the coin is that with piracy, I get to choose what I buy, like in a free (software) society I should.

I bought World of Goo on my Wii, and enjoyed it, sure. No problem. But about 90% (hey, 90%, how about that) of the other crap I bought from WiiWare I will never get refunds from.

i'll add the fifth entry, have excellent support, especially true if it's not a game software. somehow some people feel that support is cost while the software product because it's doesn't require any physical material to built it isn't :(

Thank you for writing such a thoughtful, balance article on piracy and us pirates. I personally prefer the full version of any software, game, movie, or music before I buy. Just last week I bought HBO's The Wire. As for software or games, I bought Dead Space after playing it through for free. But really, most software should be donationware. I might even pay more than a publisher would charge standard if it works really, really well for me.

I also didn't realize World of Goo was out there as I've been pretty busy lately. Seeing as I have some time I'll have to download the torrent from one of my private trackers and try it out. Thanks for the headsup, Jeff. You're the greatest.

Take the hints the music industry finally is learning:
1. DRM-Free
2. Online Distribution

"That's not entirely true ... There are several server emulators for World of Warcraft that allow one to host a private server. I would probably deem that as pirating"

Myabe technically, but not in practise. While WoW private servers exist and are not liked by Blizzard, they are hardly real competition for the official servers. The percentage of people who prefer to play on such servers is negligible compared to the number of people who pay for online access to the official servers. Of course I'm going by word-of-mouth here but the community of WoW gamers and bloggers is a pretty strong one and feedback about such private servers does get around.

I have mixed opinions on piracy, though being a pirate myself, I guess it might be a bit hypocritical to judge others.

I personally pirate games and apps to 'preview' the software, to see if it's really worth my money.
If a game or app is particularly awesome, then heck yea i'm buying it :) Just like World of Goo <3 I did recieve my first copy through 'questionable' means, i'll admit, but.. after playing it for a while, I grinned and coughed up my $20 for the real thing. It was just that awesome and beautiful to play, and I felt a bit guilty the first time through after finding out it was made by such a small group of developers. Also, recommended it to a few friends, who also bought it later on :)

There are always going to be pirates, and no game or software is ever going to be safe.
But to avoid this, all they have to do is put a little more time and effort into it, to change peoples' minds, as well as stray away from putting ridiculous price tags, and security measures that punish their honest customers.

razrien@hotmail.com

"If you're a pirate, you're a dick." - So dick's a pirate?

How bout this

If you're a developer, you should do your due diligence on "keeping honest people honest".

There are tons of very popular consumer shrink wrapped software out there that aren't being pirated at all simply because the devs did their due diligence on implementing a simple and efficient copy protections. If you can't be bothered to do the research then get a consultant.

Here's a nice explanation of what the quoted phrase means, courtesy of "Ozy":

"It?s an English idiom to distinguish the common criminal from the hardcore lawbreakers.

For instance, suppose you have a nice lawnmower. Do you leave it out in the front yard over night, or do you lock it in a shed in your back yard? Most likely you lock it in a shed. But surely you realize that if someone REALLY WANTED TO, they could jump the fence, cut the lock, lift your lawnmower over the fence, and pawn it off despite your security measures. Nothing you would seriously consider doing can hope to stop a reasonably determined individual from taking your lawnmower, but that?s not what locked sheds are for: they?re for stopping the much more common individual who is willing to commit criminal acts when there is very little risk or difficulty. Thus, it may be said that putting your mower in a locked shed in your back yard instead of leaving it out front is a means of, ?Keeping honest people honest.?"

I always protect my softweare with Microsoft SLPS, CyrpKey, or HASP and completely disagree with a few comments above that state your software will always be cracked.

I always use at least 2 methods of protection on a single software title and my titles have not been cracked yet.

If you do the work you want to be paid. If you want to be paid protect yourself.

Buy dongles.

I have bought World of Goo and I love it. I am dismayed by the piracy rate, too. But I also think they did everything to get the highest piracy rate possible with every legal buyer getting a persistentn and non-personlized link to download the game.

Even if DRM is not the way to go - puting a visible email in the download link might already have made a difference. Retiring a link after X amount of downloads, too.

Sad story, though :(

Mr_Protection.. Crypkey is a joke. A total nightmare. It resets it self constantally, and refused to run correctly on some pc's. I swear, Crypkey drives people to piracy.

I agree with Jeff 100%. By paying for software, people are actually taking part in the evolution process - deciding what software shall survive and prosper and what should be forgotten. By pirating it, they are like behind a glass wall. Watching, but with no way to influence the future. The same applies to freeware. Despite giving it for free, it still did cost the time to make and unless the author gets compensated - no one will refuse a donation.

On the DRM and pirating: Piracy can only be solved by social means, not technological ones. In my shareware, I use a very trivial serial checking/evaluation counter. If someone wants to use it without paying, they know it is illegal and it is their decision and their problem. I am not fighting a lost cause.

*Yawn*

https://www.ambrosiasw.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=34059

Old news, people.

I think most people just think it's such a "silly little game" that it doesn't warrant paying for it.

I heard the less than 24 hours after Windows XP was released there was a crack for it.

I'd love to buy this game but unfortunately PayPal thinks that there is huge hole in the Earth instead of country of Serbia, so it's impossible to buy anything via PayPal from here. I wonder how exactly PayPal managed to become so popular and still they are oblivious to how many countries there are in the world. I guess I'll just have to pirate it since it is a great game.

Hey. This World of Goo is great. Anybody know of a crack for it?

No, seriously. Thanks for the heads-up, Jeff. That game is so addictive that I had to go and buy myself a copy (the official story is that I got it for my son).

Here's an example of a "great freaking product" that has a fair charge ($49 to $361, depending on the edition, if you buy online): FL "Freaking" Studio! https://flstudio.com/

Versions of the product 7 and prior have all been cracked but real producers who use this software all buy it and what does it matter if kids at home pirate this. When they releaes their songs they will have to buy it anyway (or maybe after they get some cash from a few first songs :P).

Otherwise, thanks for another inspiring post.

> I think it's pretty clear that the "but you should have [paid for the copy]" part is pointing at the fact that an individual or organization *owns* the software in question.

What is it that they own? What other things did they copy from to make it? What, if someone makes a copy of it, have they lost? Certainly not anything that they had before the copy was made.

Ideas are *not* owned, they are held; and they can be held in multiple places simultaneously without diminishing any one instance. To say that one of those instances is ?owned? is a poor way of modelling reality.

When someone gains the same idea (or a modified version of it), the original idea remains. Attempting to apply scarcity to things that can be copied indefinitely without affecting the original is futile, counter-productive, and harmful.

None of this is intended to *justify* copyright infringement. But attempting to equate copyright infringement with ?stealing? is baseless, because copying does *not* remove nor diminish the original. If you want to justify restrictions on what people can do with a copy of an idea, you need some other model than ?ownership? of scarce resources, because copies of ideas are not scarce and they can't be meaningfully owned.

Haven't read all comments, so forgive me for repeating.

But as a software developer, I can understand that people want money for the work they have put into the product. Most people don't even understand how much work is required to produce good software.

But, one thing that developers should remember is that they should be proud of people using their product. No it doesn't bring food on the table but it shows that at least you did something right.

2nd, I think that it should be possible to make it more attractive to own a legal copy of the software. I am actually proud of being owner of some of the software that I have invested in.

3rd, but what really surprises me is from a global perspective. They may not pay for your software, but that are still USERS of your software. I know several developers using visual studio, artists using photoshop or 3dmax. They maybe used the software unlegal for several years when they where kids or students, but they sure does pay for the products now and are experts with that software now. Because they got the chance to use the software. And no it doesn't pay your bills now, but what if Bill Gates stopped everybody from using Basic that day, the we might all write Cobolt today ? :)

One thing is to earn about $50,000/year
(source: https://nyjobsource.com/salaries.html) and pay $20 on a game.
Another thing is to earn $4,500 (source:
https://noticias.uol.com.br/economia/ultnot/2007/09/14/ult4294u799.jhtm)
and pay the same $20 to play the same game...

Piracy in a global world is very different if you analize it...

bignose
> What is it that they own?

They own the right to control the distribution of their software. That's what copyright is. When someone makes a copy of that software, they are, in effect, stealing the distribution rights. That is a real, legitimate loss that 2D Boy has suffered. The value that they legally possessed was diminished.

Of course nobody can "own" an idea if ownership means the ability to prevent other people from having it, and making a copy of a piece of software does not alter the state of the original. But that's not how the concept "ownership" is applied to intellectual property, and nobody has tried to argue otherwise. To own the software you write means that you should be able to control its distribution. Nothing more, nothing less.

From the Gamasutra article that Jeff has linked:

"[...], knowing that eliminating 50,000 pirated copies might only produce 50 additional legal copies does help put things in perspective."

https://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17350

In other words: the imaginary "conversion rate" of a former pirate to an honest buyer is just 0,1%. This means it's a more effective way to make a better game in order to get better sales rather than fighting piracy at all costs.

Similarly, a typical free-to-play game that supports itself via micro-transactions and/or optional subscriptions has less than 5% of its user base actually spending money on it, with at maximum 1% of the users making the gross of the income.

I'd like to sum it up like this: free-to-play is the future. See, it is already here, we just call it piracy and it is illegal. In future i expect to see a lot more games that are given away and spending money on it will be completely voluntary. And an additional positive side effect could be a reduction on compromised computers, since (my personal guesstimate) 95% of all cracks & keygens are infected with trojans, backdoors and what not.

@steffenj: Free-to-play is not the future. As you already pointed out, IT DOESN'T MAKE MONEY.

Also, spending money on games is already completely voluntary. Nobody's making you play games. Just watch ? if games all go free-to-play with optional paid perks, people will start hacking the perks and say, "In the future, I expect to see a lot more perks given away and spending money on them will be completely voluntary."

As some of the comments have suggested in various ways, the model isn't effective. The price of a product will approach its marginal cost, and in the case of digital goods that is $0.

I am a professional software developer, and I have no intention of ever selling software. Even when I worked at a large software company and we sold Enterprise Software, realistically we weren't selling the software. We were selling support, deployment/installation services, training, etc. The software was a vehicle for all of it.

Now I worked in web apps and, again - the software is free.

I think ultimately that's how our entire industry will work.

The guys who make Reaper have it right, IMHO. It's a free, unrestricted, unlimited demo, and then a reasonable price for a damned fine piece of software which is constantly updated, for free.

Like others have said, I won't bother with a demo if there's any kind of restriction and jump straight to the cracked version floating around the torrent networks (and I'll often skip risking the extra download time too, if they don't specifically say 'unrestricted'). I refuse to pay for software unless I can 'try before I buy' on principle, and I don't much care if it's through official channels or not. The developers' business sense is their concern, not mine :)

Re: Tom on December 28, 2008 08:06 PM

Tom, let me ask you the following: Imagine you invested hundreds of hours writing your next greatest app; invested into high quality 3rd party tools/libraries/etc (open source or otherwise); invested into technical writers, graphic designers, etc - so at the end you now have new greatest, coolest application. And lets assume that because it is so great it does not require neither support (because all written so well), nor deployment/installation support (because you use high quality installers and users can do it as click-click-click) nor training (because you have great software and great documentation) - now what? are you still planning to give it away fro free. If yes then let me ask you - what is your business model would be? When you are saying: "I think ultimately that's how our entire industry will work." - what industry are you talking about? If you are talking "software development" then this is to vague. You can not seriously pile-up together Enterprise grade applications and $0.99 iTunes apps.

Darren,

>But that's not how the concept "ownership" is applied to intellectual >property, and nobody has tried to argue otherwise.

You might like to check out:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.html
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html

I read this long list of comments, and it is sad, really sad, to see that no one is brave enough to even touch on the ethical implications of piracy. It always gets second billing to DRM, copyright law, economics and software delivery models. I feel like an old fart (at age 32) to even bring it up, but I think it should be said at least once. Want to *help* stop piracy? Talk to your kids about morals, and use a post like this as a start. I'm a programmer and a parent, and I know it doesn't have to be an after school special, but at least start there. Most people I know that pirate, do it for one of two reasons:

1. They don't think it is wrong.
2. They know it is wrong, but don't care.

The vast majority are the former. As small an issue as it might seem, this one topic can provide a lot of insight into how your kids, friends and family view "rights", and how far those rights extend in any civilized society.

Brian,

Agreed.

Brian,

You wish to call your kid who shares a game with his friend a PIRATE?

My definition of a pirate is this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate

Nice article, Now that I have money, I buy and play, aslo i don't share game and software like I used too. But what do now is I play the game nad if I like it I buy it. Now that I can afford to buy, I bought all the games that I played and liked, and I still enjoy playing them. But if the game is too costly, I wait for few months when the gaming company release jewel case or a less priced box of the game or buy it when there is a discount sale, but I make sure I buy a legal copy of the game. As per software goes, I started using the open souce software or free software, or wep apps. Yea I do download movie, tv shows torrents, but I don't distribute them, so that makes me a small time pirate. I support the concept of 'Try and Buy' Try a software/ game for few days, if the user/ gamer like the software/game they will buy it, I mean the developers should make sure that the software/game should be interesting enough/provide enough functionality, and price the software/game affordable to attract the user/gamer to buy the software/gamer. I bought few games adn softeare after trying the demo version. The policy of returning the software/game if the user/gamer is not satisfied is good one, that way the developers will make sure that the game/software is great not only in demo version, but also in the full/ retail version.

Well.. the fair price point is exactly what is going to solve this problem..

the World of Goo is 20$.. only 10% of users buy it..
Sell it for 10$ and if original games percent goes to 30% - there is more profit.. Why don't game companies realize this point..

Especially game/software prices are high for Asian countries like the one I live in - India. There is a huge market.. as 1/6th of the world population lives here and guys we are developing rapidly now and have a huge customer base too..

As many posters have said, now I'm older and I can afford to, I pay for games and software; GTA 4 being the most recent purchase, it took forever to install and demanded that I sign up to two different gaming accounts to use it, it tried to install background services that start with XP takes forever to boot needs the disk and pissed me off royally - it took a day before I could even play it.

If I now downloaded a cracked illegal copy that won't give me all this hassle even though I paid for a legal copy, I bet I would still be considered a thief.

I've preordered World of Goo in June. Since then, my "magic key" somehow got lost inside my large mailbox. So, out of pure lazyness, I've downloaded a pirated copy.

Did you know that World of Goo is #2 top selling game on Amazon, just after World of Warcraft?

On a related note: If you like World of Goo, you will love Crayon Physics Deluxe. Preorder now. And no, I am not affiliated to either WoG or CPD developers. :-)

https://www.crayonphysics.com/

I have noticed 1 common thing when it comes to piracy, be it software, music or movies. If someone doesn't want to pay for the item, they won't. The person who is willing to pay for it will pay a price - and that price could actually vary a fair bit. One of the hard things about pricing is that its "easy" to put the price up, but hard to bring it down (hence sales and half price periods).
I have long had the view of minimal (if any) DRM etc... It just seems to make things harder for the honest user. The one that does not mind searching for a key/hack will just find a way around the DRM.

I wait for a year or so till the prices of the original DVD go down (or they come bundled along with expansion packs). The best part of buying older best-selling games is that your current hardware config is able to play it. No need to upgrade to the latest-and-greatest graphic cards!! I recently bought Far Cry for $10 and a 10-in-1 Command and Conquer First Decade DVD for $15.

But yeah, DRM is a pain. I hate inserting the CnC DVD in the drive everytime I want to play. The DVD is starting to get scratched. I cant copy the DVD either and run using the copy. It makes me want to get the game for free.

Why should the honest end-user who has paid for the game (not the DVD) end up in a loss ?

People still pay too little attention to the fact that not every pirated copy is a lost sale. I have tons of pirated stuff on my computer. If now someone invents an uncrackable piracy protection (not realistic, but let's pretend it exists), would I really go and buy all this stuff? No. Actually I would start considering carefully what of this stuff do I really need and what stuff is nice to have but I can also happily live without it. The result is, I would maybe buy 10% of it, because I really need it and stop using the other 90%, because I don't really need it and cannot afford to spend that much money on stuff I don't really need. Actually the 10% estimation is already too high, because if I really need it and keep using it for years, I will sooner or later buy it, being afraid that one day they release an update that won't have a crack anymore and I won't be able to use it any longer. So I end up buying the essential software in the long run anyway.

And let's face it, how much software do you really need? Do you really need a game? It's nice to have, but do you really need it? I don't think so. I can live happily to the end of my days without ever playing a game again in my whole life. I may miss it sometimes... or I may not, not even sure how much I would miss it. When I'm very busy I have no time for playing games and I don't feel like missing it. I usually play games to kill time where I don't know what else to spend it on. The more busy I am, the less of this time exists.

The really essential tools I need for daily work are all bought already. So I might skip 100% of the pirated stuff if I can't get it for free any longer. Most software companies would be extremely surprised to see that their sales won't significantly go up if they were starting using an uncrackable copy protection. That is my strong belief. Pirated copies are most of the time not lost sales, so why spending time and resources on fighting them in the first place?

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.

World of Goo does that, yet isn't effective against piracy. Your conclusion is flawd, so the entire article is.

There are two kinds of pirating copying binaries and copying designs. If you copy a binary and then figure out how to break the code licensing scheme you are a first degree pirate. When you copy a business plan you are a second degree pirate

First degree pirates rip off things like autotune or photoshop and are essentially small timers. The software they steal would not have been bought to begin with these types of thieves have no money and will never get any personally or in a business. The software producers are partly to blame because you can build unbreakable licensing schemes but that takes creativity, money and hard work. So first degree pirates actually have little effect on the overall software business. I would guess that 90-10 is reversed. These pirates cost producers 10% of revenue at best.

Second degree pirates are more insidious they copy your business plan. Sun is a second degree pirate hence the inclusion of the post script below. A second degree pirate wants to be a competitor in a market space, analyses the competition, gets funding, and starts off.

Sun thought Unix should come to market (even if it wasn't ready). Their technology was not better: 'big Sun iron' is no better and less reliable than the IBM mainframe Z series. Their medium iron was not better than Vax clusters. The Sun desktop is pathetic, even for free. On the processor level Sparc never beat MIPS or Itanium. These will have to be taken as axioms since this is not the place to debate technology.

Third degree pirates steal your morals. The whole Sun/Linux/Java Open Source is a chimera a fraud. It leads you to believe in fairy dust that is you can get something for nothing. The dot com disaster was a side effect of this. XP programming does this at the methodology level subverts morals.

Sun after 25 years has nothing to show for its effort but carnage. Their market share is too small to analyse any more they are dead as a company, zombies stumbling around with one foot in the grave, a stiff wind and they will fall over for good.

As 3rd degree pirates Sun nearly wrecked the mainframe business, did wreck the Vax business, and has devastated the software business with "Java". What was just another oo language was spun into a cultural revolution of failure. Java as a fat client, puhlease! Java bloatware in the middle tier (you have to cluster because no single system will stay running very long). Java databases spare me.

The whole radical, cool, chic, XP programming is a scam. What is useful about it is testing, testing and more testing (truth is good developers were doing it anyway). Analysis and design went in the toilet. They even tried "emergent design" as a model. I tool XP "guru" Robert martin that emergent design is nothing but evolution which produces great works over millions of years with trillion of corpses for failed iterations. Great for biology and a planet, bad for a software product.

Scott McNealy and Sun are second and third degree pirates, much more dangerous than first degree. The BSA and SEC can do nothing about Sun, only IT managers can, time to sober up, the part is over, put the crack pipe and the bottle down and get back to work.

Sure this is a bile filled screed, but based on my observations there is a lot of truth to it.

P.S.

Of course it is sick, NO ONE writes software for free. This is the big lie of open source. All participants have ulterior motives, get a better job, be seen as an expert (when in fact you are not), start a money loser and hope deep pockets will buy you out with a big pay day so you really did not work for free (Red Hat/JBoss). Once the money never comes the old operant conditioning kicks in and the extinction response is on its way.

Bill Gates was right (as always) stop stealing software and pay for it! What about all the crippled enterprises that have bought all this half-ass ware? XP Programming where programmers rule, not managers, where schedules are impossible to predict (think about that one). The code is ?too cheap to measure? like java: write once, debug forever.

The worst thing a business can have is someone else?s source code, they want a product that works and support that goes with it.

Sun has the been at the forefront of wrecking the IT industry with this disingenuous crap. Solaris lost on the desktop, it lost in the data center and is draining the American economy with the illusion of free ware.

Here?s the source code is a virtual ?F*ck You letter?. I learned that bitter lesson more than 15 years ago when a vendor called and asked where I wanted the 1 million plus lines of source code escrow to be delivered. I said the null file!

+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

| Michael Meeks Says OO.o Project is "Profoundly Sick" |

| from the important-alternative dept. |

| posted by timothy on Sunday December 28, @06:32 (Software) |

| https://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/28/0124230 |

+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

unassimilatible writes "[0]Michael Meeks, who works full time developing [1]OpenOffice, writes in his blog that the project is '[2]profoundly sick.'

'In a healthy project we would expect to see a large number of volunteer developers involved, in addition — we would expect to see a large number of peer companies contributing to the common code pool; we do not see this in OpenOffice.org. Indeed, quite the opposite we appear to have the lowest number of active developers on OO.o since records began: 24, this contrasts negatively with Linux's recent low of 160+. Even spun in the most positive way, OO.o is at best stagnating from a development perspective.'"

Discuss this story at:

https://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=08/12/28/0124230

Links:

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Meeks_(software)

1. https://www.openoffice.org/

2. https://www.gnome.org/~michael/blog/ooo-commit-stats-2008.html

I purchase all of the games I want to play. I must say as a paying customer NOTHING angers me more than CDs being required to play. If I wanted to swap CDs in and out to play games I'd buy a console.

"...less than %10 of Altair owners have bought BASIC"

"It's an interesting figure: less than 10% of the "users" had actually purchased a copy; the other 90% had pirated it."

Interesting, and *wrong*. That's only 90% piracy if you assume every single Altair was running Micro-Soft BASIC.

I love world of Goo (and paid for it) could not agree more.

I've written a shareware product and 90% sounds about right... maybe a little low. I could defeat the problem by having the software "phone home" at startup to validate that the product was purchased, but I find this sort of thing unethical (e.g. what happens when the product is discontinued? or my site goes down? etc).

To help combat the problem have a "Lite" version of my product that's free. Its good enough for most people, so it gives them less of a reason to pirate my software. I'm sure this has cost me some paying customers, but I hope its encouraged some to pay for the extra features if they need them in exchange for me being nice enough to offer some of the features for free.

Re: gsgiles on December 29, 2008 06:17 AM

gsgiles inasmuch I do agree with your points about XP and Open Source (definitely not agree about Java, for variety of reasons) - I think you need a hug :)

@Chuck: "Free-to-play is not the future. As you already pointed out, IT DOESN'T MAKE MONEY."

You got me all wrong. Do you really think i would have made my comment if it had such a fundamental flaw? Duh!

I repeat: if the free-to-play users, less than 5% spend money on it and less than 1% produce most of the income. However: many FREE TO PLAY GAMES ARE PROFITABLE and some even highly so. The margin of profit is often higher than for AAA titles if you factor in development costs, marketing, and such while the risk to develop free-to-play games is low. Whereas with a AAA title especially if it does not have a strong online component the pressure to be successful is often immense.

See for example the Petroglyph story and why they are committing to free-to-play. You'll find other examples if you dare to google.
https://www.edge-online.com/news/why-petroglyph-is-venturing-into-free-play

Bill Gate's letter is very confusing. You can't really conclude that the "piracy" rate was 90%.

The piracy rate could be "only" 51% ("most of" the "hundreds of users" of BASIC).

How many Altair owners were there?

If "hundreds of users" was 200 and there were 2000 overall Altair users, then the piracy rate could have been zero.

I was like Jeff. When I had no job, I used to pirate everything I could get my hands on. In addition to the base money issue, you couldn't exactly go to the local Walmart and buy software in those days either. The nearest software store was a Babbage's in the mall in the nearest major city 50 miles away. My first software purchase was the end of my pirate days. I proudly marched up to the counter and paid for it, all $60, I think, with dimes and pennies from my overloaded pockets. I was really popular with everyone in the store that day. Especially the friend who drove me there, who looked like he wanted to be anywhere else.

These days, I'm saving a bloody fortune on software by not buying anything ever. I haven't paid for a single piece of software since 2001, and I haven't pirated anything either. Linux is a great conscientious choice for people who want to stop hemorrhaging money paying for the same stuff every few years, but who hate piracy.

I still think Linux would be a lot more successful if people weren't willing to just rip off software. I know a lot of people who give me the "Linux is for dweebs" kind of spiel, and then they talk about how they don't have to choose, because they have cracked copies of Windows, Photoshop, Office, etc., and it's all free too. These same people never want to have anything to do with FOSS stuff that runs on their native platform either. Why settle for second class junk when you can just steal $5,000 worth of software?

The worst thing is most people don't even think about it at all. "I got a new computer, and then I went over to Bill's house to ask if he could load Office on there for me. I tried your OpenOffice.org thing, but I couldn't figure out what to do about something or other, Espresso, Pajama, something like that, but Bill hooked me up, so I'm good, thanks."

I've dedicated my life to this open source crap for six years, and I'm about ready to throw in the towel. It isn't even that people are making a conscious choice to steal. They're just so abysmally ignorant that they have no idea they're stealing. Then when you point that out to them they start looking around a little and thinking, and then they say screw it, they've been stealing all this time, why start paying now? Everybody knows computers only run one operating system anyway. Everybody knows that, you weirdo.

Ah, bah humbug. Bah humbug indeed.

Wake me up if that game ever actually has a Linux version. I'll buy a copy. For now, I'm not the slightest bit lured by that "Linux beta coming soon" on there. Sure it is. I bet that sign has been up for two years.

Michael, see:

We Don't Use Software That Costs Money Here
https://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001097.html

> World of Goo does that, yet isn't effective against piracy. Your conclusion is flawd, so the entire article is.

Possibly. I think you have to add items #3 and #4 to my list:

1. Have a great freaking product.
2. Charge a fair price for it.
*3. Make it more convenient to buy than to steal
*4. Provide instant gratification

as LKM noted in one of the earliest comments, above.

iTunes is a good example of a previously pirate market working, if you meet all four rules.

"less than 10% of the "users" had actually purchased a copy; the other 90% had pirated it."

That's not what he wrote.

Less than 10% of the Altair owners had bought a copy of Altair BASIC, but that doesn't mean that the remaining 90% used pirated copies. I'm sure a fair share of them did, but aren't you jumping to conclusions when you assume that ALL Altair owners used BASIC?

> Of course nobody can "own" an idea if ownership means the ability to prevent other people from having it, and making a copy of a piece of software does not alter the state of the original. But that's not how the concept "ownership" is applied to intellectual property, and nobody has tried to argue otherwise.

To use terms like ?own?, ?property?, ?pirate? etc. is very much to frame the conversation in ways that make the analogue to how people understand physical property.

You make my point for me: Since these concepts don't map well to the concept of property, we only confuse and confound rational discussion if we cling to terms with entirely irrelevant baggage.

Ideas are not property, they don't behave at all like property, the things people do with them are not at all like the things they do with property; and it is harmful to coherent discussion to continue using terms that imply those falsehoods.

After reading this, I went and bought the game. Someone help these 2 guys out.

I do think that the people who think DRM doesn't cause piracy are more than a little deluded. Take Spore, for example. It was the game most pirated in 2008, and the main reason was because people didn't want to pay for the DRM that came with it. They didn't want to tell EA that SecuROM was ok.

As for me, I only pirate things which are so old as to be incredibly difficult to find or I can't afford on my 3-day-a-week-minimum-wage job. Not quite justified piracy, but piracy on it's best terms, I believe. As long as you want to pay for it, I suppose?

This is one reason why many of the game development studios, including the one I work for, are releasing on consoles months before they release on PC. This way they get the revenue from the console releases (since they are the most difficult to pirate) and then later on when the initial console sales have declined, they release it on PC to get a bit more yardage on the title. The income from games these days drops off fast after the initial release and even faster due to piracy.

The problem isn't just with software, any field that relies on IP suffers.

A film I made 2 years ago is finally being released now.

It has already been downloaded over 4 million times.

It's not out in most of the world yet.

It cost $9M to shoot, $25M in total.

It makes film-making a waste of time.

It wasn't even a stunning film :-)

The Mutant Chronicles

Geoff-Cinematographer

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

Amen to that!

The single most effective thing I've ever done to decrease piracy of our games was to build this simple webpage (and SEO it a bit):

https://sillysoft.net/warez/

Tracking shows plenty of people hit it and end up buying.

The biggest kicker in this equation is world of goo is both fantastic and entirely DRM free.

These are the good guys. It's a shame.

I've rambled on about just living with piracy in the past (https://www.davidwhitney.co.uk/content/blog/index.php/2008/09/30/protecting-your-software-authorisation-and-you/) however I always feel a little gutted when people stick it to the "little guys".

If only it'd work on xbox live arcade as well as wii ware, but I just don't see how it could be ported without being dumbed down or with really odd controls.

OK. I am a longtime steam hater, but I checked out world of goo on Jeff's advice. It's not my kind of game, but I ended up purchasing two other games while I was looking around. One of them is decent (it works like it's supposed to anyway) and came at a good price. The other was a fairly new MMO that worked once and has been a source of endless frustration since. Now I remember why I NEVER purchase software. Retailers and software producers alike have for years been pushing the idea down our throats that software, once purchased, cannot be returned for a refund. EVER. What happened to the old axiom "the customer is always right"? What happened to my rights to be satisfied with the product? Why does nobody ever mention this aspect of purchasing software when discussing piracy?

World of Goo is actually the only game I pirated, but enjoyed it so much I ended up buying it anyway. The "killer feature" for me - besides the AWESOME game that it is? The "no DRM of any kind" feature. Yup. Had it not been that, I probably wouldn't have bought it as I use many different computers, and ended up installing the game on many of them.

So if you did enjoy the game, consider buying it. It's more than worth it :)

Part of the reason I buy so much on iTunes and Amazon is they already have my credit card details, so purchasing is easy.

Make it just as easy to buy your crap and I'll buy it too.

I tried to buy Peggle from PopCap games the other day. The experience was so frustrating I gave up. I'm fairly sure pirating a copy would have been a hell of a lot easier. I didn't pirate it though. Although I pirate stuff about 30% of the time nowadays. That figure was a lot higher when I was younger.

Though to be honest, as a developer who will inevitably sell some software crap to other people, I couldn't care less about piracy providing I'm making enough money to get by. Perhaps I'm just not that greedy. Or full of my "rights" and everyone else's "injustice".

Also to be honest, I'll pick a business model that works. IMO selling software doesn't work anymore. I don't think it ever did work to non-enterprise markets frankly. Bill figured that out early and locked all the vendors into forced sales contracts. Nice work Bill.

Where I work we sell some of our software products commercially.

We moved to hardware dongles because we found some of our re-sellers have bough a single copy, then they sell that copy over and over to their customers. They pocket the money, we get nothing.

This is not piracy this is out-and-out theft, and probably fraud.

Extremely hard to do anything about it though. Hardware dongles are expensive but seem to be effective. Even then, I'm sure a well-versed cracker would bust that protection - eventually.

I've been playing world of goo for a couple months

and I just bought it due to this article.

another great game from a small team is castle crashers

> The single most effective thing I've ever done to decrease piracy of our games was to build this simple webpage (and SEO it a bit): https://sillysoft.net/warez/

This is VERY VERY smart. Kudos to you, and I think more games devs should do this as well. Being the #1 search result for piracy says that you care about your product, and your customers (the ones who can be swayed, anyway) will notice that. Combats "broken windows" piracy.

> some of our re-sellers have bough a single copy, then they sell that copy over and over to their customers. They pocket the money, we get nothing.

> This is not piracy this is out-and-out theft, and probably fraud.

It is neither theft, nor piracy, since both of those refer to *physical property*, and what your rogue re-sellers are doing has *no* connection to your physical property. If you invoke a misleading metaphor, you abandon rational discussion.

What you describe is copyright infringement. Please keep the terms clear so that discussion can be reasonable.

@Dustin
give your approach another dimension - develop a crack for your game and spread it over the web. the crack would expire after 15 days when user is quite addictive to the software and more pushed to buy

It's great to see that people I admire have the same tastes as me; World of Goo is indeed a wonderful game (pre-ordered it btw), and it was chosen as RockPaperShotgun.com 's game of the year. I just hope the developers still received a fair compensation for their work which would allow them to continue producing such gems.

@Usman Shaheen
Not sure I agree with your idea. Sounds like a strange implementation of Guerrilla Marketing... here are my of the top problems with this:
1. by doing so you would invite people who probably would never buy your product in the first place
2. you potentially can alienate people that would be your customers
3. I am not a lawyer but would question a legality of distributing something as a "crack"

So, why not use licensing and create evaluation that would expire after 15 days...

Last (maybe).

Someone else blogged about Zombies today: https://tinyurl.com/8b7enh

Its one thing for a zombie-making manager (ZMM) to take this to heart (ZMM to-do's: Get a heart) but what about those who are being zombified, especially in a tight market?

A positive attitude will help a lot. Yesterday and today, Joyce Meyer interviewed Dr. Leaf, a brain researcher, on her show. Dr. Leaf explained how memories are basically stored as negatives or positives. The negative thoughts actually release fear-related chemicals everytime their accessed with cause something like 85% of diseases. The positive ones actually release chemicals that bring healing to your body.

Being zombified could definately be taken as a negative. Some of the steps to take are:
1. Forgive your manager.
2. Repent for your own bad attitudes, words, actions, etc. That means to acknowledge your wrongs and be sorry for them. As long as you maintain an "I was justified" or "I deserve" attitude, you maintain the negative thoughts.
3. See were you can improve your performance, by being more proactive or education
4. Realize that you have gifts & abilities others don't. Look for opportunities to bring those out more.

Lastly, realize what you really deserve. Someday, you'll stand before God. Do you really want what your deserve or do you want mercy?

I would agree with 90% piracy as well. We sell to educational software fortune 5000, governments and schools. We raised money then invested almost a million of dollars in our software and marketing then had to lay off almost all of our employees (9 out of 11) because multi-billion dollar companies bought one license for $300 and shared it with all of their employees. Since we sell training software even at $300 per person we are saving our customers over $1200 per person compared to classroom training not to mention travel. It would be nice to charge less but our potential market is in the low in the thousands. We tried selling some popular titles in the $39.95 but actually lost money on them.

No matter how tight you crank the licensing, they'll find a way. Citrix is a great way, load one copy on the citrix server and share it with everyone or load it on a notebook and pass it around or common area machine you name it they find a way to break it.

When we surveyed our customers, we got a 99% customer satisfaction they love our products but not enough to buy one for each person.

It's frustrating for the 10% who were honest.

I do feel even worse for you game developers who have supply chains and only make a few dollars per copy sold. Kids think you get the full $49 but with licensing fees, wholesalers, distribution, packaging, shipping, retailers not to mention your large staffs, there is very little left at the end.

Piracy is a violation of international copyright law and is a felony, if you are going to steal software you might as well jack some cars or rob the corner store it's not much different. Although for now the chances of getting caught are pretty slim. The BSA (bsa.org) offers a $1,000,000 reward for piracy leads. Accidental license misuse is a $150,000 fine per occurrence and intentional license abuse is a $250,000 fine per occurrence.

If you know anyone who is ripping off software let the bsa.org know and get your 10% reward.

according to the BSA:
What is Software Piracy ?

Software piracy is the unauthorized copying or distribution of copyrighted software. This can be done by copying, downloading, sharing, selling, or installing multiple copies onto personal or work computers. What a lot of people don't realize or don't think about is that when you purchase software, you are actually purchasing a license to use it, not the actual software. That license is what tells you how many times you can install the software, so it's important to read it. If you make more copies of the software than the license permits, you are pirating.

World of goo is too short and simple for 20$.
Aquaria is a hundred times more complicated and costs 30$.

I pirated as a child and I continue to pirate as an adult, even though I make scads of money. Most software is poor and overpriced. BUT I do purchase, rarely, iff (if and only if):

* I have no other choice and the price is reasonable, or
* The software is great, the price is reasonable, there's a benefit to buying over pirating (such as updates), the developers seem great, the purchase process is easy, and I can pay them without a middleman getting a big chunk of it.

Those are a lot of criteria to meet, and that's the only way I'll pay. When I create software, I try to making it something that EVEN I would buy.

"The worst thing a business can have is someone else?s source code, they want a product that works and support that goes with it."
Yep, that is why there is Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Without it, open source would never have been so successful.
"Here?s the source code is a virtual ?F*ck You letter?."
Yep, when Netscape died (which is another mess altogether, basically they tried to make money from it's web browser, then MS came in and made it's browser free, repeat for web servers), they made it open source as Mozilla. After that, Phoenix was started, which was then renamed to Firebird, then Firefox, which gained a lot of popularity and is now a very common browser.
"Java as a fat client, puhlease! Java bloatware in the middle tier (you have to cluster because no single system will stay running very long). Java databases spare me."
Yep, the most common use for Java was Java applets in the browser. MS responded, BTW, with .NET.

"Sure this is a bile filled screed, but based on my observations there is a lot of truth to it."
There are indeed a lot of truth in there, though it is quite gloomy indeed.
The Sun parts has some truth, but I need to do more research for me to say it is all true, and this is certainly not the place to debate many of thses.
"Of course it is sick, NO ONE writes software for free. This is the big lie of open source."
Indeed, though it is not a complete lie, you are right that many open source programmers work at companies like OSDL and Red Hat.
"The worst thing a business can have is someone else?s source code, they want a product that works and support that goes with it."
Yep, that is what Red Hat's, SUSE's and Cygnus's business model depends on.
Without it, open source would never have been so successful.

"The Sun desktop is pathetic, even for free."
Which era? Because I know about Sun OpenDesktop, CDE and other failed attempts at a Unix desktop.
"Sun after 25 years has nothing to show for its effort but carnage."
"Sun nearly wrecked the mainframe business, did wreck the Vax business"
These statement looks contradictory.

You people should read some of the older virus phreaking magazines. There's a guy that wrote a C compiler that he then compiled a virus with. At runtime it decrypted one routine, called it, re-encrypted the routine at the return address, hashing the key with instructions interspersed with the real instructions of the routine before calling another routine.

Cracking a program that encrypts itself like that will take years. If the actual code of your program is encrypted on disk with changing keys, and there is never the full program decrypted in memory, you will be safe for weeks at the very least.

Also this sort of thing is exactly what TPM makes possible for unencrypted programs. Making a program that cannot - in any way - be started without contacting the home base first.

If you're going to include a protection then put some effort in it or if you buy the protection then include penalty terms if it breaks too soon.

When I buy protected software then find out it was already cracked (few days after release) I feel cheated because I paid money for something that didn't work! I should get some money back for paying for broken copy protection with the product, especially if the protection was from 3rd party protection company. There should be some kind of money back guarantee from the protection company that if their protection breaks in less than say 2 months then there's a penalty.

On the other hand, while protections can be made to last much longer (made infeasible to crack) if that only leads to further resrictions to buyers such as recently with game DRM with all kinds of limitations and possibly loss of ability to sell it used, then that's taking freedom away from legit user and such business should not be supported (EA).

So keep in mind, DRM & licensing = BAD and different from normal copy protection, which *can* work but very few have even tried to implement properly.

It is true that we will never stop software piracy 100% but does that
mean we should give up.I agree that some people who use pirated software would never pay for it in first place.They will find it on private FTPs. On the other hand someone who is looking for cracked version and can not find it easily could end up buying legal copy.That is even more true for small companies in need of software for their business.So, if link to your cracked software is in google search results You should do something about that.In my opinion, that translates to real lost profit.

Sam Begic
www.dasintelligence.com
Internet monitoring and enforcement

"You wouldn't steal a lawnmower from the John Deere dealership when you need to mow your lawn, would you?"

Depends. Does the dealership have a magical lawnmower-copying machine that can produce an infinite number of lawnmowers at zero cost? No? Then I guess I wouldn't.

Folks, comparing copyright infringement to theft will only convince the people who are too stupid to see the difference between physical property (where every "copy" has its own materials and production cost) and information (where every copy after the first is basically free for everyone involved). You aren't that stupid yourselves; why do you want to treat your potential customers like they are?

Piracy is only a problem if you're stuck in the mindset of selling software like a mass-produced consumer good. But that's not what software is. The proper price for a copy is approximately zero, since that's what it costs to make a copy.

The proper place to collect your money is *up front*: demand to get paid for the service of *writing* the software in the first place. If all the programmers of the world banded together and said "nuh-uh, we're not writing another line of code until you give us some money", they'd get it, because the demand is there for their services.

Do that and the business model will follow. When you start thinking about the infrastructure you'd need to support a business model where programmers (or musicians, or anyone else whose "product" is information) are paid up front, it might sound a little overwhelming: you need some way to bring producers and consumers together, coordinate payments and reputations, resolve disputes when the finished product isn't what people thought they were paying for, etc. But really, it's no less reasonable than the infrastructure we already have for today's business model: in the grand scheme of things, isn't it already pretty ridiculous to spend $millions on a way for a program to know whether it's running from a hard drive or a CD-ROM?

I myself am an offender of this crime.

I don't have a lot of spendable income and therefore cannot buy every game I want to try, I will usually download a game to see how I like it, now these aren't games that I would buy if I had the money, but games I think I might like.

If I do end up liking it, I will buy it (finances allowing). It surprised me when you used World of Goo as the example because it is a game I couldn't get locally. I illegally pirated it, finished it and loved it. I only recently got a Mastercard. And with it I bought World of Goo off Steam.

I have downloaded and installed this copy legal copy, but I haven't run it once.

I won't pirate games I KNOW will be good (I will get some liking out of), right now I have a Collectors Edition of Dawn of War 2 reserved locally, and am waiting for the Starcraft 2 release date to be announced so I can get a Collectors of it.

Point is I would have never bought Portal or World of Goo without pirating them first. However, as I get older I hope to have a bigger income, and more to spend on programmers, something I wish to be day.

I live in Australia and new games are ~$100 here, Australia also (evidently) has one of the lowest software piracy rates in the world. I don't get why we pay double to triple what Americans pay (during exchange rates variances) and we don't pirate games as much, why our new game prices haven't fallen. "You do good by you, We do good by you"?
Though through 2008 there have been some notable exceptions, Spore was released (at least at one store locally) at $80 and so have some others.

Jesse on January 14, 2009 05:38 PM:
> Folks, comparing copyright infringement to theft will only convince
> the people who are too stupid to see the difference between
> physical property (where every "copy" has its own materials and
> production cost) and information (where every copy after the first
> is basically free for everyone involved). You aren't that stupid
> yourselves; why do you want to treat your potential customers like
> they are?

So the first customer pays $1 million and the rest get it free? Who gets to be first?

Regis on January 7, 2009 11:36 AM:
> I pirated as a child and I continue to pirate as an adult, even
> though I make scads of money. Most software is poor and overpriced.

I saw an empty house the other day that was priced at $200000. But it wasn't good enough for the price, so I'm just squatting instead. The fruit at the supermarket looked a little bruised, so I put it in my pocket instead of the shopping cart. I looked inside a book at the bookstore, but I didn't think it was very good, so I stole it.

Shall I go on?

"The proper place to collect your money is *up front*: demand to get paid for the service of *writing* the software in the first place. If all the programmers of the world banded together and said "nuh-uh, we're not writing another line of code until you give us some money", they'd get it, because the demand is there for their services.

Do that and the business model will follow."
Yep, that kind of business model is already very common. Consultants commonly use this business model.

Way too many torrents offering Wiiware World Of Goo lately. It's like offer me a different game for Christ's sake!!

I like many other posters believe that there has to be some kind of middle ground between software makers and users. For example, when I first got on the Internet in '99, all the programs and files I downloaded came in zip format. Obviously, Windows 98 didn't have a built in zip utility. Also, FLOSS wasn't as available for Windows-based systems as it is now. So, like many users, I downloaded WinZip, used it for a while, then finally got tired of the nagging messages about it's usage, so I went online, found a serial and started my new life as a software pirate. Later on, it became games that were no longer available, little utilities for playing those games, and later on when I got an iMac, Surfer's Serials and pirated copies of Photoshop 5.0.

When I started having money, piracy became something I wanted to avoid. But software makers started creating "activation" schemes. This led me to hunting down cracks for activation for software I legally purchased.

Windows XP was awesome, and worth the purchase, but the activation and genuine advantage became a problems since I was constantly reinstalling my OS (every few months). After Microsoft stopped activation over the phone, I went back to pirating software, getting my hands on a volume license and CD.

I rarely pirated music because I always thought about the artists quitting, and also because I saw a CD as an archive where I could rip my MP3s that *I* controlled the quality of the rips.

Nowadays, even at 6 - 12 Mbps Internet, torrenting modern games isn't worth the time and effort it takes to acquire/crack/patch/repeat as it does to pay 20 bucks for the game, with the DVD and the state of mind that comes with a non pirated title (no rootkits, botnet apps, trojans, etc.)

Good software will always have a loyal following. Bad software... not so much.

If games are the only software products consumers will buy themselves, and 90% of games are pirated, then it is hard to create your business around consumers.

On the other hand, corporate software means active selling by salesmen, unless the items are small, something like under 1000$. What do you have there? Google adwords, the Microsoft tax, and niche monopolies like Photoshop.

I would say that things would be much better if consumers bought more software directly, and the same goes to other intellectual property. But this is unlikely to happen in the near future, until all software is web-dependent and controllable.

>> Would you rather have 90% of the copies of your game be pirated, and sell the other 10%; or have 0% piracy, and nobody buying it either?

What a dumb argument. This is what's known as a "false dichotomy". So, tell me, NM, would you rather have your car stolen, or have your car stolen, your house burned down, and be sodomized? See? You should be happy that only your car was stolen. A false dichotomy is setting up two situations and pretending that they're the only two options.

I would say that things would be much better if consumers bought more software directly, and the same goes to other intellectual property. But this is unlikely to happen in the near future, until all software is web-dependent and controllable.

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Well it seems there's two clear sides to this saga.

On the one hand we have the die hard software capitalists fresh from their Sony records DRM spat with the likes of George Michael and Prince, err, sorry, 'Symbol'. Who with their rather limited grasp of software that could be described as flacid at best, demand we all use rather archaic copy prevention and DRM systems requiring instant software activation with unwieldy long License Keys or flimsy dongles.

Then on the other there are the anti capitalists who, when they're not breaking shop windows at G2/7/20 etc meetings, are demanding that all software is free and no one should have to pay for it, just that they don't want to be the ones to develop the stuff as they're too busy hugging trees when they're not throwing bricks.

Of course we can't make software free, or rely on people paying what they think may be fair for it, as nobody would want to be the sap who pays up for what would be some rather poor quality and under funded bundle of bugs. At the same time we shouldn't have to suffer crappy DRM with dongles or license keys as long as your arm.

OK. enough's enough. What we have here is a great opportunity. Now we have the technology to let people have a decent trial period of a software title before they buy, and not have a bunch of hoops to jump through should they want it. Software that uses a FRIENDLY DRM service offering free trials and easy activation can be distributed at a fraction of the cost, ensuring everyone pays and that all that cash goes into improving it.

It seems clear to me that friendly DRM with free trials is the only way forward, and that any software company choosing otherwise is doomed to failure. There is already one use friendly DRM service out there (www.fingoo.net) and I'm sure there will be plenty more to follow. So lets all put down our bricks and our legal binders and relax knowing that eventually time and technology will save the day. And a few savvy users voting with our feet of course :oD

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