Re: WHO???

[CUTblakeney@home.com (Jeff Blakeney)]

On Fri, 13 Aug 1999 10:17:42 -0800, Terence J. Boldt
<apple2@cgocable.net> wrote:

[snip]
>What hurts is when a resonably priced useful product that
>is currently on the market gets distributed by pirates.  At
>this point the pirates are hurting the developer and
>ultimately themselves when the product or company goes
>belly up.

Most people in this discussion only ever talk about the developer and
the person who "pirates" a developer's work.  There are a lot more
people involved than that.

If people "pirate" a program, the developer doesn't make as much money
as they could have from that product making them think that the
program isn't as popular as it might be.  This will have a definite
impact on the developer's decision to do bug fixes and upgrades to the
current version.  This also extends to the developer's decision to
create new programs.

Why should users get shafted because people would rather "pirate" a
program rather than buy an original

Then there are the resellers, companies/organizations/individuals that
have originals or used copies.  There are originals available, you
just have to look.  These resources are drying up because there aren't
enough people actually buying software so it is getting more difficult
for people who want to buy software to find the resellers.

Why should these companies/organizations/individuals and the people
who are looking to buy stuff be shafted because people would rather
"pirate" a program rather than buy an original.

Also, what about the developer's of competing products?  The Merlin
assembler is no longer available commercially and if you were to get
an illegal copy of it, what incentive would you have to buy a copy of
Orca/M from the Byteworks which is the only product with the same
capabilities?

Why should these developers get shafted because people would rather
"pirate" a program rather than buy an original

These are just the points I came up with off the top of my head.
"Piracy" affects everyone, not just the developers.

The "piracy" today wouldn't be as bad as it is if it wasn't for the
FTP sites.  If people had to spend the time and effort tracking down
someone who has an original or copy of a program they want, convince
them to let them copy it, make the copy (which may include having to
deprotect the program first) and probably more, they wouldn't mind
spending the money for a new or used copy.  As it is now, they just
fire up their FTP program and within minutes or even seconds, they
have a copy.  No effort involved so why bother spending any time
trying to track down a legal copy.

I keep pointing out that it is illegal to do so to try to reduce the
number of users who are "pirating" stuff simply because it is easier.

By the way, I've quoted the words about "pirating" because people like
to play with the semantics of the word.  In this message, it means
making an illegal copy of a copyright protected work against the
stated wishes of the copyright holder.

+------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Jeff Blakeney - Dean of the Apple II University in A2Pro on Delphi     |
|                    Delphi Apple II Forums Web Pages                    |
| A2: http://www.delphi.com/apple2   A2Pro: http://www.delphi.com/a2pro  |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------+
   HyperCard IIgs course now in session in the A2Pro forum on Delphi
        Learn to Program in GSoft BASIC course now in session