Comments on: Software Piracy – Not Always Bad

By: NthDegree

NthDegree — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 19:19:29 +0000

Software 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

By: http://tigertelevision.blogspot.com/

http://tigertelevision.blogspot.com/ — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 09:36:52 +0000

excellent 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

By: Max Howell

Max Howell — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 11:43:30 +0000

Yeah, this is just an opinion piece.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 02:26:42 +0000

I 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.

By: Max Howell

Max Howell — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 10:03:26 +0000

Heh Those are great. Thanks for linking

By: BBlackmoor

BBlackmoor — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 04:26:28 +0000

I 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/

By: kay

kay — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 17:23:59 +0000

its cool it was just what i needed for ma assignment…….

By: JYK

JYK — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 04:27:27 +0000

thank u 4 postin this!
u helped me so much on my writing
tnx!

By: Graduation or Jail? - Vivian's blog

Graduation or Jail? - Vivian's blog — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 21:32:46 +0000

[...] home, gets used to it, learns to love it, and gets his office to buy him a copy for use at workâ€ (Howell). He suggests that piracy generates sales. This process of a â€œdelayed saleâ€ should not be [...]

By: Max Howell

Max Howell — Tue, 01 May 2007 14:44:37 +0000

Yeah I forgot how on the Internet speculation isn’t allowed and you have to have hard data to back everything up.