Re: Net piracy?

[foegelle@sleepy.cc.utexas.edu (Michael Foegelle)]

In article <306vrm$21t@bmerha64.bnr.ca>,
Jeffrey Robertson <jeffr@bmerha2a.bnr.ca> wrote:

>Here's another thought to muddy the waters of this discussion:  Some people
>have suggested that pirating would vanish if the price of software would
>drop.  No one wants to pay $100 for a shrinkwrapped game or word processor
>or whatever, and then find that they don't like it.  So they pirate it,
>ostensibly to test it, and then never get around to buying a licenced copy.
>Make it cheap, and people will gladly pay to soothe their guilty consciouns.
>(How _do_ you spell that?  I've tried everything I can think of!)

Well, this brings up a subject that I always said was a crock and I think 
that the advent of CD rom's have proven it.  Software companies, etc, 
who've always lamented at the "Lost profits" due to piracy have long claimed
that if they weren't "losing so much money to piracy" that the price of
software would be less.  The obscene prices of video cartridges for stuff 
like Nintendo should have been our first indication that this was truly a
load of crap.  There, piracy is virtually 'nil (cept for those few in other
countries who buy gizmos to copy rom's, but for your AVERAGE user, piracy
is an unknown concept.)  So you say, well maybe the cost of producing those
cartridges is extremely high (I'd be surprised if it's more than $5 a unit!)
so that kept them high.  Well, now with the advent of CD ROM's as the 
popular new computer media, I say B.S.!  After all, for an idea of the cost of
mass producing a CD, look at the cheap classical music CD's that you can get 
for $3.99.  Obviously they can't cost more than a couple of dollars for 
disk media, so they certainly aren't costing any more for media than a program
that takes a couple of disks, which then have to have the program copied onto
them, etc.  In the CD ROM world, piracy is again virtually 'nil (the person 
to person kind...  I grant that there could be a piracy network like exist
for various music labels, but that's different.); there just isn't the 
storage space available to make it practical!  

So, where's the great reduction in software prices.  I grant that there are a 
growing number of labels (note this is mostly for the PC or MAC market here,
but who's making them for Apple II's?) under the twenty dollar mark, but those
are typically old things that just didn't sell well at a higher rate (or disks
of PD/Shareware) and they're trying to squeeze the last little bit of revenue
out of them.  So, if the CD rom market isn't suffering the "lost revenue" of
piracy, where are the big savings that the software industry has so long 
promised?  It's time for them to put up or shut up on the topic of "lost
revenue" due to piracy.  The simple fact is that 95% of the people pirating
software would not have bought the original product to begin with, so talking
of millions in lost revenue is pointless.  The first obvious fact is that most
couldn't AFFORD the amount of software that they pirated.  A reduction in 
software prices would have some effect, but there is a limit to the amount of
cash base out there available as software revenue.  

Sorry to have gotten off on this, but the absurd claims of lost revenue due
to piracy have always annoyed me and this seemed a good opportunity to jump
on my soap box.  Granted you can actually claim some loss due to those who (as
stated above) may have intended to buy the software and "borrowed" a copy to 
try and it either ended its usefulness before they got around to buying it, 
or they just never got around to it.  (Typically if a ware remains consistantly
useful, they're likely to want to upgrade or something someday..  But if you
play a short adventure game and finish it, you might not buy it..)  Anyway,
thanks for letting me get this off my chest in this forum.  I'm sure some of
you will have violent reactions to what I've said, but just remember, I'm 
not making a statement either way about piracy.  I'm just stating that claims
of tremendous losses due to piracy and that software prices would fall if
piracy didn't exist are false and absurd.  I write software myself, so I'm 
not particularly anxious to have it pirated, but I'm not foolish enough to 
think that every pirated copy truly represents full retail price out of my 
pocket.

Again, thanks for letting me rant...

Michael Foegelle



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