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.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 15th, 2006 at 10:50 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.