p2pnet.net Reader’s Write:- A significant number of Readers’ Writes are articulate and to the point. Some are for, some are against, some are just raves, and some are obvious shills.

Software piracy is GOOD came from KOS blog and pulled a comment. It’s anonymous, as most of our posts are, but it doesn’t read like it’s from your typical industry flack trying to pass as a ‘concerned reader’.

p2pnet is very definitely against Big Music’s cynical characterization of ordinary people who share music online as perverted “criminals” and “pirates”. But we’re equally against genuine software piracy – that’s to say the true criminals who steal, counterfeit and duplicate software specifically for resale on blackmarkets and undergrounds deserve to end up in jail.

If the entertainment industry would take its its head out of its anal orifice and use p2p for sales and marketing – like Mike Robertson is doing with Linspire – we’d all be much further forward.

With software sold and distributed inexpensively online, there’d be very little physical product. There’d be a massive drop, certainly, but it wouldn’t be in sales. Rather, you’d see a significant reduction of overhead, distribution, manufacturing, and legal costs (Hollywood wouldn’t have to sue anyone any more), illicit CD/ DVD operations would perforce all but dry up and there’d be a concomitant reduction in the pirate problem – the real one, not the fake one involving ordinary people who share online.

There’d also be implications for the various administrations and enforcement agencies around the world which are at the moment constantly being pestered to death by the labels and studios.

Jane and John Doe would be safe from Big Music, the entertainment industry would be redefined and the world would be a happier place.

What a dream.

For now, here’s the opposite of the KOS item.

Now read on >>>>>>>>>>

I too was once a software pirate.
By A. Nonymous-Coward

Back in high school, almost all the software on our home PC was take-home-and-return-next-morning stuff from the office or from CD-ROMs borrowed from others. I had friends with warez worth the equivalent of a Honda on their machines. Software piracy, I figured, was just another part of regular life.

Then I went to college and took a programming class just to see what this whole “coding” thing was all about. After witnessing firsthand the misery and effort that goes into writing GOOD code, my attitude towards software piracy changed. Sleepless nights and agonizing hours staring at a workstation – and watching my buddies do the same – gave me new respect for programmers and software engineers. Now, every piece of software on my PCs is legally paid for, registered and supported.

So before you install that “gratis” copy of Photoshop 7 or some other warez, just remember that some poor dude in a cubicle shed much sweat and tears making that thing work. Hotshots of IT though they may be, most programmers don’t roll around in Bentleys or jet to Vegas, loose 100K on stupid bets and laugh it off. They’re regular persons like you and me. Neither does programming occur as portrayed in the media, where someone sits at a PC and simply churns out line after line of stuff that works on the first or second try. They work hard to hammer out smart code that can take weeks or months to get right. And now you’re just jacking it. How fair is that?

Now, before you make a effigy of me to burn in the streets, consider that I am also aware that there is a flip side to the coin.

The first point of this is that many of the pirates couldn’t afford to buy the software in the first place, so it’s hard to argue that any legitimate revenue is being pilfered. An example of this would be a college student using an illegal copy of Photoshop to edit a picture. Most such students could never afford the $600+ cost of the package, and even if they did use the version available on the school’s network machines – if it is installed there – Adobe still wouldn’t see any extra revenue, so there’s no sense in complaining about that.

A good deal of the pirated material is also being used for non-commercial purposes. Real harm, I think, is done when commercial firms engage in privacy, not when a few guys use an illegal copy of Visual C++ to write useful code that has no business objective. This is harder to justify, however. Taken to its fullest extent, it could mean that it may be proper to jack just about anything – software and other – for a hobby. Just try walking out of Hobby Lobby with model epoxy because you’re using it for a “non-commercial purpose”. You’ll be needing a lawyer.

We must also remember that while most software purchases are practically an impulse buy in the US, the same can be crushing to users in other lands where per capita income is lower. I recently read a comment by a software industry official saying that IT in such places in unlikely to advance if piracy continues at the current rate. Huh? That’s like saying that we’re unlikely to win the war against AIDS or malaria if we continue to make low cost drugs available in the Third World: it doesn’t make sense.

Piracy in these places reduces the obstacles to viability for small outfits. Maybe such activity allowed the participating firm to employ an extra person, whose income goes to another family and helps to improve their standard of living. That might sound sappy, so I’ll put it this way: if the firm couldn’t afford to pay for it in the first place, then squawking about piracy makes no sense. It’s like the aformentioned case of the kid with Photoshop. If the firm becomes able to pay for the software but continues to use it illegitimately, then we have a problem.

The point of my post is that we must be reasonable. Of course, in the good US of A, “reasonable” is anything that a team of well-paid lawyers can ram through court or legislators can be cajoled into enacting. I guess the best advice I can give is to take a programming class. You’ll see what I mean. If you don’t take the class, just think about the guy in the cubicle, working, working, working….

This entry was posted on Friday, July 9th, 2004 at 12:21 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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