Nice Approach To Pirating

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jamirokwai
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Re: Nice Approach To Pirating

Post by jamirokwai »

My software (optionally) calls home each start, loading about 1k or so of data. The data is: the version number, the date, news about the update (in several languages). If you enter the ID from buying, you may then download the update - which replaces the binary in a second, and restarts. While testing, I had problems finding the problems, because the binary has about 1mb. Download was finished in half a second, replacing was finished after another second :-)

So it's a onetime hassle entering the ID into your new purchase, it does not produce much traffic for me NOR the customer - and I can log the ID, and the Date. If someone misuses his ID, I can remove him from the database. That's it.

Software protection is a bit like DVD-protection. The pirated copy is better than the original (no Ads, no FBI, no Menu, I only want to watch the Movie, and so on). That's a fact, and it makes me sad (technically spoken).
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Re: Nice Approach To Pirating

Post by luis »

jamirokwai wrote: Software protection is a bit like DVD-protection. The pirated copy is better than the original (no Ads, no FBI, no Menu, I only want to watch the Movie, and so on).
That's true for DVDs. They brought this on themselves anyway. For example with the invention of the regions. Pirated DVD movies are a far superior product (if you are not interested in the extras, usually removed). Better compression, same quality, no unskippable ads, no FBI warning, no region limitations, real portability between devices, no name calling after you paid for it. They went too far and totally deserve piracy.

For software it hasn't to be this way, you can have advantages.
The ability to get updates more easily than with a pirated copy, for example.
The technical support (when needed and when actually working).
The ability to log-in in a forum for registered users only.
And so on.

So not always pirated software is a better product. In reality usually it isn't. But it's free.
And here come again what I wrote in my previous post about what can move the scale's needle.
MachineCode wrote:Nope, you'll feel differently once it happens. It sucks. All you can do is think about all those lost sales. :(
You can't know if a pirated copy is a missing sale. You can't profile the actual use of it made by that user, or his propensity to buy that software at a certain price range. I used a lot of pirated software for various reasons in the past, for brief periods of time, and I wouldn't buy any of them for 1$. So my download was definitively not a missed sale. I have bought probably 40-50 sharewares in the years and some commercial packages though.
Last edited by luis on Tue Jun 13, 2017 6:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Nice Approach To Pirating

Post by MachineCode »

luis wrote:You can't know if a pirated copy is a missing sale.
If someone's using a pirated copy, then yes, it's a lost sale, because they're meant to have paid for it.
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Re: Nice Approach To Pirating

Post by luis »

Your mind works differently from mine.
Anyway I would only repeat myself so I stop here. :wink:
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Re: Nice Approach To Pirating

Post by MachineCode »

Yes, these discussions get heated and bad very quickly. I also will not continue. :)
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Re: Nice Approach To Pirating

Post by Zach »

I'll take the bait.

You really can't know what a missing sale is, imho. Someone could be using it, if for no other fact that yes it was free. They may NOT be using it otherwise, and would not have purchased it more than likely, because they couldn't afford it.

This holds especially true for games. Copy protection is killing the game industry far more than piracy IMHO. I can download a game, it'll most often come with a crack so I can play it, in some cases even multiplayer will work (or you can find an alternate server someone has setup). When the game is patched with an update, a crack will appear the same day or within hours. The DLC will be cracked too.

Meanwhile a legit user buys a copy of the same game, but can't even play it because his Internet might be down, or the companies verification server might be down, or the copy protection is causing issues with his computer or disc drive, doesn't like the drive, or doesn't like that he is running certain software.

It's a huge fucking headache, and for what? The ever increasing price where $60 for a launch title is becoming the norm, and you can't even play the game if you are unlucky?
Add to that the frustration of many gamers that we are being fed the same old horse shit, every time a new game comes out. Same gameplay, maybe some better A.I and graphics. No real innovation and distinction is happening except for the Indie scene - which I would argue is booming right now due to the low prices, and outside of the norm game ideas.

Why are you spending $10 million + on a game that is nothing new? Why do you deserve my money for that bullshit - why can't you make it with a $1million budget?
The games industry is repeating ALL the mistakes of the RIAA & Hollywood Movie industry; and they are so blind they don't even fucking see it.

It's a no brainer why people pirate.
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Re: Nice Approach To Pirating

Post by IdeasVacuum »

It's a no brainer why people pirate.
No matter the reason, a pirate is a thief, nothing more than that. I can't afford to buy a Rolls Royce car but that doesn't mean I'm entitled to steal one, even though it's way over priced. If the industry wants to stop 'piracy', the first step that needs to be taken is to remove this romantic title and give it the title of shame that it deserves.
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Re: Nice Approach To Pirating

Post by luis »

Well, this is another front, so I'll write another little thing still.

LOL at the thief label. I cannot believe the majority of people is still blinded by this.
Apparently stealing should be a simple concept to grasp, the mechanic behind it I mean. The before. The act. The resulting after.
I don't want to explain it because it's so obvious that would be wasted breath. Who knows knows.

You are calling me a thief though, since as I said I downloaded pirated software. I also removed protections from a couple. I distributed that couple. I had my reasons. I also bought that couple.
I don't consider myself a thief so I'm very at ease with all that. I could certainly be one, I could kill too. It's easy to put a label on someone, but a real person can't fit under a label. All depends.

Anyway, not that I care, but it's nicer to know you think so.
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Re: Nice Approach To Pirating

Post by Tenaja »

thief
noun, plural thieves.
a person who steals, especially secretly or without open force; one guilty of theft or larceny.
steal
,verb, stole, sto·len, steal·ing, noun
verb (used with object)
1.
to take (the property of another or others) without permission or right, especially secretly or by force: A pickpocket stole his watch.
2.
to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etc.) without right or acknowledgment.
3.
to take, get, or win insidiously, surreptitiously, subtly, or by chance: He stole my girlfriend.
Justify it any way you want, it fits the proper definition.

In reality, though, I would venture to guess that just about everybody under 25 years of age has pirated something, if they are at all techy. There is always a self-justification for appropriating something that is not paid for.
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Re: Nice Approach To Pirating

Post by skywalk »

Well, I am very glad luis chose to investigate PureBasic in depth since I have learned and benefited a lot from his posts.
Though, much of those posts would not have been restricted by the demo version.

The way I have come to ascribe a crime is; there must be a victim.
All other meanings are political or religious and time sensitive and basically bullshite.
Prohibition came and went, so 1 day a crime, the next day a cocktail.
Cross a border of some state and it is illegal to have exposed skin!

So is there a victim in this instance?
The victim in a theft case is the proprietor and the customers of the product stolen.
The author is deprived of income and the customers' suffer increased prices and theft controls.
In a world without crime, I would never lose my keys or lock myself out or be delayed by simple actions. :(
Yes, both author and customer are victims.

In the case of someone using an unlocked version of fee based software, theft is absolute until the user purchases a license(with interest) or stops using the software. :wink:
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Re: Nice Approach To Pirating

Post by Zach »

IdeasVacuum wrote:
It's a no brainer why people pirate.
No matter the reason, a pirate is a thief, nothing more than that. I can't afford to buy a Rolls Royce car but that doesn't mean I'm entitled to steal one, even though it's way over priced. If the industry wants to stop 'piracy', the first step that needs to be taken is to remove this romantic title and give it the title of shame that it deserves.
You entirely missed the point I was trying to convey. My post was more of an observation as to WHY people steal. Whether or not they are justified does not matter to you, or me, or even them in terms of defense; but they certainly feel justified in doing it. No matter what their core reason / ideology is (Open Source free everything vs haves and have nots, and whatever else people can come up with to justify their actions).

Until recent years, I had not actually witnessed paying customers threatening developers, on their OWN forums to Pirate software (games in this case) because it wasn't working properly on their system because of stupid things like DRM in its various forms.

To me that is a very telling sign of HOW to curb piracy, along with the price point angle. That is also a niche market of computer software, something like PB, or ProGUI while definitely in the high-end of money I am willing to spend on actual productive software/applications - is still worth the cost to me as a consumer. And so I pay it.

But once someone (or a group of people) views the software as not justifying the price tag, the developer has lost. Period. Unless they can come up with ways to either cut the cost, provide a reasonably feature-available demo period that can convince the customer to purchase, or offer enticing new features to convince people even more about purchasing.

Game piracy can almost be summed up as: Marketing and Retail Price. That is the only, valid cure. The games industry needs to fundamentally change to address this. They are operating on a broken and obsolete retail model (And sweatshop publishers like Electronic Arts are slowly destroying the industry), and platforms like Steam (not without it problems) are the glaring obvious proof staring them in the face.

I own almost 80 games on Steam. I only started using Steam regularly a couple months ago, and I have periodically made purchases over that time. Some of it was impulse buying, others were just plain good pricing on a package of games. I have spent less than $500 to acquire all these games (possibly less than $350) and many of them if I purchased them at retail store price, or even full price on Steam when they launched or were not on sale / in a bundle - I would have spend 3 to 4 times the amount of money and most certainly would not have bought everything I did.

I could have easily pirated all the big titles I own as part of those purchases, and in some cases I have already played them in the past because that is exactly what I did.
Does that make me a bad person? Possibly, I suppose it does. But that doesn't change the fact that when Steam made these games affordable to me and offered them in heavily discounted bundles, or individually for less than $20 I purchased them. Because I could afford to.

If I were the head of a business, I wouldn't care how I got my 10 billion dollars, but I would instantly see the wisdom in selling X amount of games for $20 - $25 versus selling X less copies at a higher price. If I sell more copies at a lower price, I get more repeat customers and establish loyalty, which gets me even more buyers for my next product as my reputation continues to grow. The problem with business is "parity" isn't good enough for them under a capitalistic model (You'll never make more than X amount of money if you maintain a constant customer base at lower prices, unless you can reduce the manufacturing cost - which can be hard to do with highly-skilled labor).
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Re: Nice Approach To Pirating

Post by Tenaja »

Zach wrote:Game piracy can almost be summed up as: Marketing and Retail Price. That is the only, valid cure. ...
If you really believe this, you are dreaming. One-dollar Android apps are pirated left and right; they are super easy to purchase, super affordable, and... super easy to pirate.

The only way to end software piracy is to end software sales. People always steal.
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Re: Nice Approach To Pirating

Post by IdeasVacuum »

but they certainly feel justified in doing it
In the London Riots, many thousands of items were stolen. Many of the thieves have been apprehended and had their say. Very few have tried to justify their actions beyond the notion that they saw an opportunity to grab something. They simply didn't expect to be caught. We are not talking about starving people stealing food either - some well paid, professional people are now locked-up in jail for these crimes.

This is the problem the software industry has - the governments will send the police to investigate and track-down shop looters, no matter the cost. Yet there is little to no effort made to catch software thieves - hence the motivation. Software thieves rightly believe that they won't be caught and punished for their crime. It is not just individuals either - there is a lot of corporate crime going on - a company might purchase one or two seats of your software but have fifty or more staff using it.
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Re: Nice Approach To Pirating

Post by case »

the main problem with the software industry is to not trust they're customers.

is someone will buy a software it will buy it protected or not.

the same formula apply on people that will not buy the software. they will not buy it protected or not.

there's some people that will not buy it if they can have it free and some that will buy it because they don't have it cracked.

but my opinion is that in fact that will not change nothing.

drm are bad because they stole the honest customer of his right to use something he purchased because of internet failure or servers down etc...

that's why fred don't use any drm or any serial number on purebasic. because he trust his customers.



sorry for my bad english.
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Re: Nice Approach To Pirating

Post by Zach »

IdeasVacuum wrote:
but they certainly feel justified in doing it
In the London Riots, many thousands of items were stolen. Many of the thieves have been apprehended and had their say. Very few have tried to justify their actions beyond the notion that they saw an opportunity to grab something. They simply didn't expect to be caught. We are not talking about starving people stealing food either - some well paid, professional people are now locked-up in jail for these crimes.

This is the problem the software industry has - the governments will send the police to investigate and track-down shop looters, no matter the cost. Yet there is little to no effort made to catch software thieves - hence the motivation. Software thieves rightly believe that they won't be caught and punished for their crime. It is not just individuals either - there is a lot of corporate crime going on - a company might purchase one or two seats of your software but have fifty or more staff using it.

That is certainly a valid point to be made. I do agree software piracy should be prosecuted, and people should be put in jail. But it has to be done correctly as well. You need to focus on the crackers themselves, and not the users. If the RIAA DMCA bullshit has taught us anything, it is that attacking consumers will not help your cause at all, no matter how justified you may be in doing so, in the eyes of the laws.

But going after the crackers is almost as futile as going after the consumers themselves, only instead of losing financially in customer opinion and bad publicity, you just sink endless amounts of cash in trying to "crack down" on the crackers. There will always be more to replace those who "go down", and furthermore there are endless ways to release such software anonymously that you just can't keep up with..

So despite what Tenaja and others may want to believe, the best way to mitigate piracy, is providing a truly solid product, that separates itself from the crowd, and has a reasonable cost compared to what you have invested in it and what you stand to make in profits.. To do away with this silly Internet Activation / Phone Home / DRM bullshit that doesn't stop anyone, except 12 year old bobby who wants to see if he can make a copy of his game he just bought. DRM is simply killing the gaming industry in this manner, by slowly bleeding it of customer good will.

You will never destroy it. People are focused on destroying it, when they should be focused on mitigating it instead. I don't care how smart you are, what schools you went to, or what business background you have; If you can't tell that DRM is causing more problems for your company by customer complaints of massive inconvenience / hoops to jump through, and outright threats to go download a crack so they can actually use the product they legally purchased and paid good money for - if you can't tell its hurting your business, you deserve to go out of business. Period.

It's a shame that will never happen to some of these companies who don't have a clue, however. So far copy protection has only ever harmed law abiding consumers, and done absolutely nothing to stop copyright infringement and the people behind it.
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