[General Topics] quicksite:
I agree with most of what you say, but I don't believe in the case of mobile phone software that the dinosaur-age licensing scheme is because some programmercock is a greedyfucker.

Maybe some are... It's inevitable that some are, but, I may be wrong, but I think it's much closer to what Chainfire has said "we're not getting rich on this stuff"... shouldn't we be able to protect our income stream?

This is again this swamp zone I am trying to describe whereby, to some extent, "the way it's been" needs to be dropped, momentarily, from the brainstorming of how to deal with all this, so that the thinking on how to solve, as Chainfire said, in WIN-WIN-WIN scenarios can even happen.

Here's another example, among many that people have, about the "ridiculosity factor" of being expected to buy multiple copies vs one.

"TuneUp" for itunes library cover art is a phenomenal product. After i'd tried all the free methods of scripts that went out to Amazon and CDnow and Google Images, to find cover art for music you have in your library that is missing cover art, and all the time it took, with very sketchy results, I learned of TuneUP, probably from a Google ad-word ad at top of search results, and tried it for the free trial period. Wow. It worked beautifully. Again, a case of, for me, a no-brainer: buy the thing -- it's worth every penny. I then find out they have 2 pricing schemes, one is an outright buy, the other is a subscription, and I think "subscription??" are you nuts? I am not going to subscribe to this utility. I want to buy it. SO I did.

And all was well - so I thought. I first used it on my MacBookPro to clean up music there, then I used it on my MacPro desktop computer's itunes library... I have learned after the fact, that this is supposedly a violation of their TOS, and that I should have bought another copy to use for my desktop. How I learned of this. Over the past year I upgraded the drives in my MacPro, starting fresh with 1 TB startup drive and 3 others. Reinstalled everything essential, then (off-topic: found myself immersed in problems from having installed Snow Leopard OS, thinking why not start off super clean and up to day) began to use my computer for work. So LOTS of extras and utilities were not installed, but as I have needed them, I then reinstall them.

That's when I got the notice from TuneUp, "your trial period is over, you may purchase the product". I thought, oh well, of course it can't know i had to start clean and so the registered version is not running. So I went to my purchase email, got the Reg code I'd paid for, and enter it into the app where it prompted me. (some additional complexity where I'd also had to revamp my MacBookPro, and reinstall TuneUp). The REG CODE didn't work, eventually telling me, you have attempted to install this more than 3 times" and some stuff about here's the link to purchase an additional copy.

I said to self: no way, so emailed customer support. They were very nice and very prompt, and said their records showed the "already 3 installs", When I explained the situation, they told me "well, actually you should have bought 2 copies to begin with, you can't use the one on your laptop on your other computer. I plead my case, I got the unlock, I was able to get TuneUp working on both my laptop and desktop.

But this is the point, and of COURSE it's subjective, even philosophical:

My view is: I buy music. I also downloaded lots of music before iTunes was born. yadda yadda many if not most of these mp3s i owned as LP's or cassettes or CD's (big argument ensues over should i have to puchase new versuions of same thing because the delivery format has been upated). We'll skip that part for now and just say: In my life, I listen to music. I don't parse that into "this is the music i listen to only on my laptop: and "this is the music i only listen to on my desktop". It's my music collection, and yeah it may be spread out but so what. It's one collection, i bought an app that fills in missing artwork for your collection, so the idea of 2 copies of the app is totally ridiculous to me.

And the issues of "but would I be giving copies to 10 friends and letting them all use my reg key?", i put that under the category of "that's not my problem as a consumer". That's part of the landscape of your doing business, it's part of the cost of your doing business, every business has risk factors, every purchase of products and services has risk factors.

So, back to top: There are two competing notions:

(1) How do we prevent or mitigate the illegal duplication and piracy of product we develop and sell?

and

(2) How do I the consumer not have to jump through arcane and complex if-then hoops just to take possession of the product I just paid for.

Somehow I think (2) has to trump (1); but I'm all in favor of developers using whatever means that make sense, on the backend, to mitigate the theft problem, but to the extent that it flows inot and interrupts the customer experience of buying, checking out, getting my product, applying my code to activate it, then it's an albatross that will kill sales, and the result will be EVERYONE unhappy.

Chainfire, I'm not a programmer, but I believe you are essentially focused on (1) .. and that it's a negotiaton or fairness argument that developers have t make with the shopping mall distributor, right?