From: ralph@bugend.edvina.se (Staffan Vilcans)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: The piracy argument to end all arguments....
Date: 15 Nov 92 22:54:31 GMT
Organization: Bugend BBS

mikeh@starnine.com (Mike Haas) writes:

> >It was 
> >a very good article about it in Datav{rlden yesterday. The reasons of 
> >piracy comes down to a few points.
> >
> >* High prices.
> >* You can use it without documentation or the manuals are just of no 
> >  help.
> >* Copy protection is made in the wrong way.
> 
> NO NO NO NO NO.
> None of this is true.
> All of these "reasons" infer some fault with the developer.  What garbage!
> They are all rationalizations as to why it's "OK" for someone
> to steal.

It's a tough world out there and everyone will have to realize that 
everyone is not a saint, but not everyone is totally bad either. 
Software developers have to understand this and realise how the world 
works out there. These points shows at some of the misstakes that 
software developers make and thus encourage piracy. I'll take it again 
and I suggest that you think some time before replying this time.

* High prices
-------------
Some prices are far too high and high prices encourage piracy, the 
higher the price is the more effort will go into cracking the 
protection. Less profit per sales but bigges sales would perhaps be a 
good idea. If you do this you reach people who have an interest but not 
big enough to pay a lot of money. Perhaps a budget version for low-end 
user would be an idea. Take Scala for instance.

* The documentation
-------------------
When you buy something you must get the feeling you got something more 
than just the disk. A good manual, good support and so on makes it more 
likley for the customer to buy the software. If you just get a single 
sheet of paper half filled with text you wonder if it was worth paying 
for.

* Bad copy protection
---------------------
Very often copy protection is based on word-from-manual or disk loading 
This is something wich is easy to crack. It's just to find the code 
segment for the check and bypass it. There have been some other weird 
ideas like dongles and special lenses to hold up against the screen but 
they all come down to the same thing. If you remove the test it's of no 
value. The protection should be in another way. If we talk about a 
game, the manual could contain essential information needed to complete 
the game. Like i adventures from Infocom or Starglider (by Rainbird). 
This also gives more rality to the games. Good examples are "Valkyrie 
17" (where you got papers and a tape with messages from an answering 
machine), "Mureder off Miami" (where you got a lot of things that 
helped in solving the game) and "Midwinter" (with maps and information 
about every character in the game).

Please not that this is not in defence of piracy, it just points out 
what software developers can do to cut back on piracy (I think it's 
impossible to stop it entirely). You should also be aware of the fact 
that just because some software is piraced it don't have to imply that 
that person would have bought it. Say a 15 YO kid who playes around 
with a piraced Ventura, I doubt he would pay 3000 USD to get it.


---
"Piracy is theft." / FAST
"Property is theft." / Pierre Proudhon