Here's an article I wrote a while ago -
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Warez for everyone!
The warez scene is a booming industry. Despite all the crackdowns, people continue
to share illegal copies of their favorite software. The software giants have been
screaming 'Pirate!' so loud and for so long, my ears hurt. So why all the fuss?
According to the media, the software industry loses
Billions of dollars every
year to pirates. There are litterally factories where pirated copies of various
software are manufactured, and thousands of web sites that distribute them. How
can the software industry
not be losing money?
Well, it's not as simple as you might think. First off, there's more than one
type of pirate. There's the pirate that cracks the software and then there's the
pirate that downloads it. But exactly which one is causing the industry to lose
so much money? The answer isn't so simple. For example - Someone makes a copy of
Adobe's Photoshop and puts it on a public web site along with a serial number.
Adobe doesn't lose any money if nobody downloads it, right? Let's say 100,000
people download it. Photoshop costs about $600 a pop, so that's about 60 MILLION
dollars that Adobe lost to this one pirate, right? Wrong.
Of all the people that download pirated software, how many of them actually use
it? There's no way to be sure. Some people are just curious about the program or
maybe they're just using it to learn the software. More to the point, how many of
these people would have actually
payed for the software if they had not
been able to download it for free? A likely answer is -
almost none of them.
Just where does a software company get it's projected sales numbers? How can a
company know how much money it's losing to pirates if their product has always
been pirated? How can you even guess at such a number? There's no way for
them to know just how many people
would have bought their product, it's
just not possible. The fact of the matter is, the software industry is driven by
the
honest people that actually buy the software. Those people would most
likely continue to purchase their software, even if they were offered a 'dishonest'
alternative.
Don't get me wrong, I don't advocate pirating in any way. But the software industry
probably wastes more money on their anti-pirate campaigns than they actaully lose to
the pirates themselves. The best way to prevent pirating is to make your programs
mores secure. By adding better software encryption and forcing users to register,
software companies could significantly decrease the pirating of their products.
But what do I know, I've never even written a real program before.