alt Hacker NewsYou said you relied on piracy.
But piracy means you were in spirit and partly in reality stealing the work product of those who learned a few years before you.
Would you want your work value to be diluted by piracy?
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Piracy isn't stealing. Legally or morally.
You know what is stealing? The heavily lengthened copyright term. Every day that has been and will be added to that, is a day that was stolen from the public ownership of the work, as prescribed in copyright law.
What a strange perspective. How does piracy dilute the work's value? I would think most informative/artistic work is elevated by spreading awareness to more people. For a lot of creators that's a primary goal (otherwise there is easier work to be had).
What is lost by piracy is some potential cold hard cash for a copy of the work, which partially filters down to the creator. Also "control" of the distribution, for whatever that's worth.
No problem if you totally hate piracy, but at least be honest about what it is and what it impacts.
They're talking about learning, probably as a broke teenager who wouldn't have been able to pay anything, I think you can save the outrage.
If I hadn't pirated Photoshop when I was a kid I would have just never used it.
The question here isn't that adobe would have seem more money, it's that a 12 year old would have not made some image macros.
I would prefer for my work value to be multiplied by piracy, personally.
There is value in freely available copies of software for people to learn on. This increases the number of people in the market who can use it, which in turn increases the number of businesses that can effectively run it.
I don’t think the preference for open source these days is an accident. It’s what kids learned on growing up, because it was the easiest to access, and they kept using it.
Give away the software to people learning, then change corporations to use it. The companies get changed more, and absorb the cost, because it’s subsidizing the education of their future employees.
Yet to meet anyone who could have bought a full fat commercial Autocad or Solidworks license as a 13yo kid. Even more so 20 years ago.
Any Millennial could tell you that that particular social contract was already well on its way through the shredder, even as early as '96 (traditional pensions would have been gone at that point). The people who came before us have done quite a bit of their own thievery.
IME, the expansion of piracy follows a contraction of purchasing power without a commensurate contraction of the expectation to consume media/information. E.g., young people would still be surreptitiously downloading ripped MP3s if Spotify didn't exist, because the economic wherewithal to buy a bunch of CDs just isn't there anymore.
If I take your car, you are now without a car. If I copy your software, you still have your software. If I was never going to buy your software in the first place, you have lost nothing.
Enough with the false equivalence.
The cost of making 100 units of software is the same as the cost of making 100k units of software. There’s a relatively fixed population of people who pirate software (i.e. people who are independently good at cracking or knowledgeable enough to apply cracks) so the answer is typically to just sell more software and the percentage lost through pirating goes down.
It becomes a problem when piracy becomes a percentage of revenue no matter what scale you’re in. This is when even Joe Shmoe knows about and can use the cracked version (e.g. WinRAR). Though I can hardly think of cases like these where your brand recognition wouldn’t also be pretty high and usable to pivot to another product.
It isn’t stealing or piracy. Stealing involves taking a resource, which makes it unavailable to others and causes the legitimate owner to have one fewer of the thing.
Piracy is stealing, typically on boats, with a threat of violence involved.
This is unauthorized copying. It does devalue the work of the copyright holder. It is illegal in many jurisdictions. It costs the legitimate owner something, the opportunity of a sale, but it doesn’t actually cause the legitimate owner to have fewer copies of the thing to sell.
If the perpetrator was some kid with no money, the opportunity denied to the copyright owner was pretty minimal. I mean we should be honest about it, unauthorized copying is bad. But it is much less bad than stealing and it is not anywhere near piracy (applying the name piracy to unauthorized copying was some over-dramatic silly nonsense).