Consequences of Software Piracy
 

I found an HTML email in my junk box this morning referring to "Downloadable Software" in which all the prices were roughly 10% of the list price for a large group of "big box" software titles. Curious, I dug a bit and found that the website is registered in Korea. Bingo, I thought, a scammer, a pirate, or both.

That got me thinking about how the "big boxes" deal with that (I don't know), and about how downloaders of these offerings deal with their "hot" copy.

If I had bought an offering (I didn't), I presume it would have failed because I couldn't register it (or could I?). How does this work -- is a purchaser simply ripped off by a useless download, or do these things actually function?

PS: I'm not asking for any form of illegal advice here -- I'm simply curious about the general problem. Clearly, if this sort of download works, the publishers have a big problem.

I'd be surprised if it wasn't some of both, with it being a scam more often than not. If it's a scam who are you going to call? ;)

I'll just say that the publishers have a big problem, and you and I and everyone who buys legitimate software pay for it with higher prices.

Trevor

You are running several risks here, and they don't add up together very well.

1. As you suspected, if a product uses a form of serial-number-tracked registration and the product you get is pirated, you may not be able to register for upgrade pricing in the future. Worse, if the product uses activation, you may be denied by the activation server and be unable to operate the product at all.

2. With a legitimate retailer, they never see your credit card information because the bank handles all that and then gives the green light to the retailer to proceed with the sale. With an unknown overseas entity, you never know if they hang onto your credit card info, and keep it for nefarious purposes.

3. There is a risk that you will also receive free "bonus" malware hidden within the software, since their copies may have been altered from the legitimate pressings.

So, you could end up with non-working software, a stolen credit card number, spyware, and no recourse. What a deal! If you're going to pirate, you might as well not pay anything. (I don't advocate any form of piracy, though.)

I once bought a cheap copy of an application off eBay, when it arrived in the post it was on a RW-CD with the serial scribbled on a post it note...
I contacted the seller and told him he was gonna put the money back in my bank and I was going to put the disk in the bin... which we both did.
If something sounds too good to be true..... it usually is.:D

Thanks for the explanations and for the PM one responder sent about how the ones that work do. It was not a temptation for me, I should add -- I'm of the Photek persuasion about looking too good to be true, AND, I try to be moral. If software is out of my price range I do without it.

and there is always an alternative!....

MS Office.... OpenOffice
Photoshop..... GIMP
Maya...... Blender

and so on.. :D

They're just the same pirated downloads you can get free from usenet or p2p networks. It's generally safer to get them from usenet however, than somebody charging for them.

Do you pay with higher prices if people use free alternatives?

OK, and what about games/movies/music, for example. I will never be able to buy everything I want on license (just because not all can be bought in this country) - but I can't do without it. For example music. I confess, that I often download illegal MP3s, but what else can I do?
Anyway, I always preferred a legal CD-copy to low-quality MP3-format. If i like an album or movie very much I never hesitate to find an в buy a legal copy of good quality

I just can't manage to cough up any sympathy for the record companies. When CDs were new, they told us that the high prices would come down as volume ramped up. It never happened. For decades, they've been infamous for screwing their artists out of their rightful take from record sales. Now they're screaming about illegal downloads, when they've obviously been colluding to keep prices artificially high and to avoid paying the artists a fair price; both practices are illegal. Money is power and with great power comes great responsibility. Part of that responsibility is setting a good example. Record labels have ignored their responsibilities, and now it's biting their backsides. Works for me. ;)

Actually, it is a very big problem especially in my country.
We have a lot of pirates. We even have a large stores or markets where you can buy a plenty of pirate products. Of course, it is unfair to the real producers. The loose their fair profit! But, honestly, sometimes it is rather handy to have an opportunity to buy cheap soft/music/videos. :) But it is 1) quite risky 2) you get low-quality product. Well, I guess my country tries to struggle against pirates but it is quite hard to get rid of pirates in terms of great corruption... :(

Since the beginning of 2008 we have a new law that makes downloading illegal files a penal action. Since Russia wants to enter WTO, it's high time these laws were enforced.
But i think that the days of piracy, as we knew it, are numbered. People all over the world are starting to realize that piracy delivers bad copies of low quality. I myself would prefer legal soft to a downloaded illegal copy. But I just can' afford Vista, for example. But I've bought some of the apps that I need for my work (such as Lingvo 12 - a good multilanguage dictionary). As far as it helps me earning money, I prefer having a stable legal copy.
By the way, is it right to say 'legal copy' in English?

You're buying the RIAA's marketing bull. It's digital. Unless you try real hard to screw it up, pirated sounds the same as not. And in fact the Russian music sites are delivering 320k bitrates while most legal media is 128k, so the Russian stuff sounds better.

I won't buy music with DRM or with low bit-rates. I look for it from mainstream US suppliers first, then the Russians, then usenet. I will get what I want, whether someone is willing to take my money for it or not.

Same with TV shows; we used to watch a few NBC shows on iTunes and they pulled out. So now we pirate them. We'll pay if they come back.

Not to mention the motion picture industry, and the studios’ ridiculous unwillingness to pay writers a fair share of online sales. Instead they’re offered a mere pittance. Excellent reason to go on strike!

To me, the real temptation for illicit downloading arises from the barriers to fair use imposed by DRM. If you want to get just the music from a concert video DVD onto your iPod, you have to rip it, pull out the audio and convert that to MP3 for the iPod. If you rip the video to a disk copy, iDVD won't play it, you have to watch it (or let it play in the background) using VLC. If you compress it to get it to fit on a standard single-layer DVD (assuming it was dual layer to begin with) because that's what a superdrive can manage, it gets distorted. I didn't mind buying the video, but it frosts me that I've got to go thru all that to put it on other devices.

Wouldn't it be sourced from the 128k copies anyway? Unless they have access to the master recordings I don't see how it would be better than the legal version.

maybe this is in reference to the "Mystery Science Theatre" style movies that are sometimes sold on the black market. you know...the ones with that are filmed on a camcorder at the local movie house by some kid in a big jacket in the middle of the summer.

They probably get their first copy from a CD, actually, which comes at 1400kb/s or so. So no, they won't have a hard time getting the better quality stuff.

Also, @ specter, I'm going to have to agree with CAlvarez on this one. It's really not all that hard to find high quality material for free if you know where to look. I have a friend who is quite proficient at it, downloads episodes of Dr. Who (the ones he can't quite get legally), and they are all at 780i, which is better than DVD quality.

Something is going to have to happen though, because I somehow doubt we are going to see any big budget movies anymore if there is no return on them. Piracy, if it ever reaches a truly massive scale, is not good for business. Is DRM the answer? I don't know. It certainly won't be until, at very least, it stops doing things that piss everyone off.

Oh, and "legal copy" is perfectly acceptable in English.

Duh :o. That's what happens when I post before I finish my morning coffee.

Funny, 'bout the time you're finishing your morning coffee is about the time I'm drinking my evening tea... ;). My posts will get loopy otherwise.

Well, we have a great deal of such copies here. They're called "a screen version" and can appear months and months before the movie is out in Russia.
Some dude just films the movie with his compact camera right from the cinema, then they make an awful one-voice translation, and here it comes! The sound is bad, the image is even worse...
The strangest thing is that people still buy this crap...

Here in Russia people aren't ready to pay 400$ for Vista, for example. This is kind of our mentality: why pay, if I can take it for free. No matter of what quality this product is, it is free!

I live with a devout pirate. Not that she won't pay for it if given the chance, but often you can't get someone to take your money for what you want. She will get what she wants, one way or another. So I've seen lots of "cam" versions where someone used a camcorder, and that's just a retarded way to watch a movie. However the screeners are nearly always as good as or better than the real thing; these are copies sent out pre-release to reviewers. Often they contain things that are later removed from the release version.

Many decades of socialism can't be reversed immediately, that's understandable.