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From: brendan@claris.com (Brendan McCarthy)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Software piracy
Message-ID: <11064@claris.com>
Date: 14 Jun 90 03:23:31 GMT
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Reply-To: brendan@claris.com (Brendan McCarthy)
Organization: Claris Corporation, Santa Clara CA
Lines: 63


I'm not trying to pick on anyone in particular, but some opinions have been
expressed here that compell me to respond...

Thom Gillespie (thom@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu) writes:
> 1) It seems like software piracy is here to stay, part of the culture

This is an invalid argument.  One cannot justify immoral behaviour just because
it is widespread in a culture.  Try to apply this argument to behaviour like
murder to see how incorrect it is.
It is rationalisation, plain and simple.
Piracy is theft.  Too people many people are ignorant of this, others
choose to ignore it.
I think part of the problem is that people confuse the media (disks, manuals,
etc.) with the software itself.  When you pay for software, you are not 
primarily paying for the cost of material goods, but rather for the development
effort of the software.  Somehow, people seem to equate the ease of duplicat-
ing these material goods with the difficulty of creating quality software.

 
> 2) Can anyone document a particular company which has gone out of business
     because of software piracy as opposed to bad documentation, service, pro
     duc etc? I imagine that microsoft, lotus, and claris are at the top of the
     pirated companies -- their products are good

I don't know of any companies that have gone out of business, but I do know
that 20% - 50% (depending on the location) of Claris software being used is 
pirated.  The amount of revenue lost to piracy certainly cuts into R&D
bugets, etc, and eventually affects the software's market price.
I'll paraphrase one of the previous posters who said, "The way to end piracy
is to lower software prices."  My response is, the way to lower software
prices is to end piracy...


> 3) In the recent Whole Earth Quarterly David Bryne is asked about music
     piracy, what does he think of it? He says, "He views piracy as advertisi
     ng   They steal his music -- and the distributor looses -- and they pay to
     come to  his concerts because they listen to his advertising all day long
     good advertising for a good product.

Maybe so, but the software industry and the music industry are very different.
For example, the ONLY way a software company generates income is by selling
software... there are no concerts to subsidize them.  

Once again, Thom, this isn't meant to be an attack on you at all.  There were
just too many fallacious ideas expressed for me to hold my ire any longer.

As a software engineer, the software piracy harms me directly.  A quality
piece of software is the result of tens of thousands of man-hours of labor,
by several dozen people over a long period of time.  It costs tens to hundreds
of thousands of dollars just to develop the software.  This does not include
production cost, the cost of writing manuals, marketing expenses, etc.
It's important for customers to realize this.

Anyway, that's enought of a rant for now.

Brendan

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