My Software Is Being Pirated

"Charge a fair price for it." seems to be a meaningless platitude in this instance, sort of a soup-bone to the "I'm only pirating because it is overpriced" apologetics. Isn't the whole point of the anecdote that World of Goo is, umm, more than fairly priced? (Seriously, people are pirating a $20 pass to pure gaming joy which requires a machine minimally ten times as expensive to run. Probably a hundred times for many of the pirates, since they are gaming enthusiasts.)<p>Want a recipe for being pirated less? Make something that people wouldn't want to get for free. <i>crickets chirp</i> Actually, that probably won't even help -- I think a large portion of piracy is essentially pathological. Bingo Card Creator -- an which assists primary school English teachers who are, on average, not likely to be reading Chinese pirate forums -- got spikes of 10k+ downloads when the new cracks were released.<p>It even had a description translated into Chinese... which was hilarious. (My brother translated for me: "Apparently it's like a gambling game for English or some shit.")<p>Honestly its like putting a shiny object in front of that bird with the unhealthy fascination for shiny objects whose name I am forgetting at the moment. If your code compiles, it will be pirated. You could make a Windows forms calculator with only a plus button, with an equals sign available with a CD Key, and people would pirate <i>that</i>. (I've often thought of trying it.)

Quote:<p><pre><code> In fact, the most effective anti-piracy software development strategy is the simplest one of all: 1. Have a great freaking product. 2. Charge a fair price for it. </code></pre> Is he joking? The World of Goo <i>is</i> a great freaking product. And The World of Goo <i>is</i> fairly priced at $20. And yet the piracy rate is still at 82% or so. So where does Jeff base his "in fact" anti-piracy claim on?

If piracy rates haven't changed in 32 years and are still at 90% doesn't that mean piracy doesn't hurt technology?<p>Developers have a perverted view, they think 90% of people are stealing their product. When really 90% of people wouldn't pay to use your product to begin with.<p>This is when DRM comes in and the developer tries to force this 90% to pay. However, people either hack the DRM or simply don't use the product. I imagine Linux got a lot more users when Microsoft started implementing DRM and some people didn't want to fight with it.<p>Adobe and Microsoft prices are ridiculous, why? Because they make money off the 10%, not off hunting the 90%. Microsoft doesn't even actively target pirates, it doesn't check every time you go to send an error report, it doesn't check every time you log in. Why? Because the 90% of people are an amazing resource to hunt down problems that will make the 10% pay even more, specifically big business.

I'm bothered by Jeff's attitude that a game made by a bigger company is somehow more deserving of piracy.

The article lacks any real point--the only solid point he's making is, "if you write software and charge money for it, your software <i>will</i> be pirated."<p>He then implies some software "deserves" to be pirated, by claiming World of Goo falls outside that category (because it isn't from the "bowels" of a "faceless EA-Activision franchise sweatshop").<p>Many independent game developers don't view piracy as black and white. I would be interested in reading an article where someone makes a hypothesis one way or the other, <i>and</i> backs it up. This article isn't that.<p>And, for the record, the amended World of Goo piracy rate is 82%. 2D Boy mentions that in an update on the very same blog post Jeff links to, but I guess that would mean he would've had to read beyond the title to notice: <a href="http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/" rel="nofollow">http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/</a>

I love threads like this because they show who's who.<p>One of the many reasons I joined hacker news was to meet like minded people for possible future collaboration. Sometimes you really get to know each other here.<p>AFAIC, there is no gray area in ethical matters. Right is right and wrong is wrong. If you use situational ethics to justify what is clearly wrong, you may have made an interesting argument, but you have also done one other thing: you have automatically disqualified yourself from ever doing business with me (and probably many others here, I suspect.)<p>A little background:<p>I once wrote some software that a partner installed in a remote client site for which our company got paid. Unbeknowst to me, he also installed that software at another site and kept all the money.<p>I bought the used car from one of my partners at an agreed upon price and found out later that he had disconnected the speedometer for as many as 50,000 miles.<p>Another partner of mine had a side business selling hardware and negotiated a backroom deal with our customer that jeapordized our major project.<p>One IT director where I worked had software salesmen leave their documentation for "project review", photocopied it, and used it for our own functional specs, with no intention of ever buying anything.<p>Starting to get the idea of how "you wouldn't have made any money anyway" easily morphs into "fuck you"?<p>And as far as software pirating goes, I have only this to say:<p>If you steal from me, I will seek recourse any way I can. Period.<p>And for those of you who want to debate ethical considerations here at hacker news, you may want to think twice about the persona you end up revealing in this public forum.

I work with folks who are genuinely shocked when I tell them that I bought a game. They come from a culture where pretty much everybody pirates, all the time, regardless of cost or income.<p>It's pretty funny, since they're game developers, and some of them dream of becoming indies.

I'm surprised that with all the talk of ethics, no one has mentioned the GNU/Stallman philosophy: those who are unethical are the ones making software but not making it free.

My software got pirated too: <a href="http://appulo.us/appdb/?page=viewapp&#38;id=2732" rel="nofollow">http://appulo.us/appdb/?page=viewapp&#38;id=2732</a><p>I'm wearing this as badge of honor. :-) Of course I treat this lightly because I think that less then a quarter of iPhones are jailbroken, so I know there is a fairly low upper limit to this, uhm, "free promotion" so to speak.

What's the piracy rate for iPhone apps?

Some ideas for increasing revenue in this case:<p>1. increase the unique value of the physical game package; include a T-shirt, stickers, something that makes possession of the package worthwhile to someone who's played the game long enough to identify with it; mention this addition in the intro or scores screen.<p>2. Run a contest on the scores server; if you are one of the high-scoring players this week and you can send in the code printed on the bottom of the box, then you get the reward. For greater psychological investment make the reward personalised with the players nick/score/rank on it.

What about abandonware? Consider two different scenarios. In the first, the manufacturer or distributor no longer makes the product (game) available, but it runs well enough under emulation. In the second, the manufacturer and distributor have both gone out of business. In both cases, the term of copyright has not expired. In both cases, the game is timeless enough to be worth playing even if it looks a bit dated.

You need to develop with mind to differentiate between the pay version of your software and the cracked version that the pirates will inevitably get. In gaming, the traditional differentiator is multiplayer, or access to a community forum where people exchange levels made with the level designer.<p>This is one thing that makes SaaS so attractive to developers -- generally it's impossible to pirate.

<i>"... Software piracy is a fact of life, and there's very little you can do about it ..."</i><p>To those who see only what is, not what can be.

apropos: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=411985" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=411985</a>

It says you can prevent piracy by:<p>&#62; writing a completely server-side application like World of Warcraft or Mint<p>But that is not true! World of Warcraft has lots of "private servers" where people play for free.