Software Piracy – Not Always Bad
Despite what the press and software-industry say, software-piracy is not always bad. It depends.
As an example, an office-worker bittorrents Photoshop at home, gets used to it, learns to love it, and gets his office to buy him a copy for use at work.
Here piracy has generated a sale.
What if he then recommends it to his colleagues? Two sales! Say he pirates a copy for his mother, she doesn’t buy a copy, why would she? But then a few months later Adobe release a new version and she has grown to love it so much that she buys the new version.
Here piracy has generated a delayed sale.
A student pirates Photoshop while at university, he copies it to all his friends. When they leave university and get jobs, they buy legitimate copies. Because most people are not immoral. Most people want to pay for what they use. But poor people can’t.
Here piracy is an investment for Adobe.
Computer games companies often have the most restrictive and alarming copy-prevention technologies, and to some extent they are justified because the lifetime of computer games nowadays is short (often months) and the costs are becoming extremely prohibitive. However I can tell a personal story from the days when PC gaming didn’t have problematic copy-prevention.
As a teenager me and my friends swapped games regularly, and as a result we all bought more games than we would have bought if we just gamed by ourselves. And in addition, we all became avid PC-gamers, always interested in the industry and its new products.
Here piracy increased sales!
I’m not a fool, I know piracy is not always good. My company sells a product where the scope for good-piracy is very limited, and we don’t think we could risk allowing it at all.
Also, companies with close to 100% market-penetration won’t benefit from piracy at all. You can often trace a graph of copy-protection against market-share. For example, Microsoft’s operating systems. MS-DOS had no protection, and boy did it help make it ubiquitous. Starting with Windows 95 you had to enter a product key, and by the time XP was released they started demanding the unpopular product-activation.
Also if your product is poor you may lose sales to piracy. As people try your product for free and find there is better stuff out there. They buy the better alternatives.
It saddens me somewhat that companies with guaranteed sales don’t make their product more easily copied, after all companies like Microsoft could/do easily absorb the cost of piracy, and the benefit of free comerical-grade software to the Third-World is tangible.
[Update: 26-Jul-2006]
This is interesting, and implies that some pirated copies have a cost associated with them, and by this we mean a real cost, not just a potential loss of income. Although costs like these can be countered by requiring “support keys” or some such system.
[...] You may like to read my previous article on piracy and its benefits to the content-creator. [...]
Piracy: Good for the Consumer July 24th, 2006 at 13:20I know I’m a bit late but its a cool article you’ve written. Makes perfect sense.
goobimama August 23rd, 2006 at 4:07Its a nice article and helped alot in commenting @conclusion of my assignment .
MAriyam Shakoor October 3rd, 2006 at 17:00MAY GOD BLESS YOU
Great article! This is exactly the kind of viewpoint I needed for my paper. Your examples helped me form my own thoughts on piracy and were very useful in my writing. Thank you for posting this.
Zack November 26th, 2006 at 19:40this website sucks
big daddy March 21st, 2007 at 16:56this website is shit
big daddy March 21st, 2007 at 16:57Big Daddy, a well formulated opinion that will give me much pause for thought. Thank you for taking the time to write it.
Max Howell March 21st, 2007 at 17:20Nice article. Good points. You just became a source for my paper.
Good job!
Trotter March 30th, 2007 at 14:24[...] a meeting how software piracy can help increase sales in the long term, by means of this argument:http://www.methylblue.com/blog/software-piracy-not-always-bad/I am unable to find a more formal or rigorus study of this. Does anyone know of one?LJ LaserJet [...]
The Joel on Software Discussion Group - software piracy generates sales May 1st, 2007 at 11:42> As an example, an office-worker bittorrents Photoshop at home, gets used to it, learns to love it, and gets his office to buy him a copy for use at work.
More likely, unless he works for a big company in the West, he teaches his colleagues how to download the bit-torrent too.
> Here piracy has generated a sale.
Here piracy has generated another non-paying user
> What if he then recommends it to his colleagues? Two sales!
What if he teaches recommends bit-torrenting to his colleagues? Two pirate copies.
Sure my scenario is not the only scenario. Both neither is yours.
If you want to do a cost/benefit analysis of piracy, you need to find out how common both scenarios are (i.e. actually do some real research, rather than just speculate) and come up with some hard data.
Pirate May 1st, 2007 at 14:33Yeah I forgot how on the Internet speculation isn’t allowed and you have to have hard data to back everything up.
Max Howell May 1st, 2007 at 14:44[...] home, gets used to it, learns to love it, and gets his office to buy him a copy for use at work†(Howell). He suggests that piracy generates sales. This process of a “delayed sale†should not be [...]
Graduation or Jail? - Vivian's blog June 6th, 2007 at 21:32thank u 4 postin this!
JYK September 20th, 2008 at 4:27u helped me so much on my writing
tnx!
its cool it was just what i needed for ma assignment…….
kay October 22nd, 2008 at 17:23I thought you might find these amusing.
http://www.blackgate.net/blog/index.php/sharing-is-not-piracy/
http://www.blackgate.net/blog/index.php/copying-is-not-piracy/
BBlackmoor December 5th, 2008 at 4:26Heh
Those are great. Thanks for linking 
Max Howell December 5th, 2008 at 10:03I agree with all those statements however it would be good to have hard data. As far as using this as source for a paper, I mean it’s not really credible lol. I would give anyone an F who used this as a source for a resource paper. But like I said I agree with all those statements, besides its a KNOWN fact that third party stores selling used copies of games take more from developer sales than piracy ever could.
Anonymous January 28th, 2009 at 2:26Yeah, this is just an opinion piece.
Max Howell January 28th, 2009 at 11:43excellent article! cant agree more… i’d like to remind you the old slogan of the 90’s amiga/atari-st hacking/demo scene: “buy a little to copy a lot”. have a nice day
http://tigertelevision.blogspot.com/ March 19th, 2009 at 9:36Software piracy is for the win. Here are a few examples of why:
* Attribution/Credit to *original* authors prioritized – Piracy does let people take credit, it lets individual developers often get more credit than their parent company
* Emulation – why have a ton of old games consoles when modern PCs make playing the games better (upscaling, smoothing, extra cheat ability, state reloading etc.)
* No DRM – I stopped buying PC games a long time ago when consoles became as-good-as but without DRM; piracy lets the consumer unlock their games. For me that is a necessity to ditching console games
* Quality assurance – crap software disappears but good software remains almost forever
* Only a legal issue – Piracy is seen as an ethical norm and is even encouraged in many countries such as Iran, Afghanistan, Sealand and at one time Taiwan. China used to encourage it (Google: Baidu legality) until recently.
* Allows access to a ton of unsold software – many companies give away software to governments and such which can never legally be in the possession of individuals; piracy levels the playing field
* Forward compatibility – let’s face it, the proprietary market milks the consumer. Newer software versions are often unnecessary and the scene makes patches to ensure older warez works on newer tech
* Appreciation – piracy allows people to appreciate software without “just liking” things just because they have paid 1000s of [name your centurion currency here] to get hold of it
* Ethical companies win – ethical companies win and evil companies lose. Ethical companies get consumers who’d otherwise pirate (e.g. Red Hat, CodeWeavers, Magnatune, id Software, LimeWire LLC).
* Fun – as much as DRM annoys people; the scene likes a challenge and enjoys the egoboo associated with owning protection schemes
* Archival – keeps software alive that would otherwise have died out (e.g. Windows Neptune, BearShare Pro 5.x, Quake 1, MusicMatch Jukebox Plus, Sygate Firewall Pro)
There are many more advantages than this. But with that said, it’s better just to use GPL/BSD/CDDL/MITed software where possible
NthDegree December 25th, 2009 at 19:19