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From: time@tbomb.ice.com (Tim Endres)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.games,comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: Thoughts on copy protection
Message-ID: <1CE00001.i53wua@tbomb.ice.com>
Date: 13 Jan 91 14:22:55 GMT
Reply-To: time@ice.com
Organization: ICE Engineering, Inc.
Lines: 41
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In article <18906@shlump.nac.dec.com>, long@mcntsh.enet.dec.com (Rich Long) writes:
>  What are people's thought on this? Do you mind code wheels/disk-based copy
>  protection schemes? Do you think Starlight's higher price is due to "assumed
>  piracy" or to perhaps more time required for development?

At ICE Engineering, we have removed all copy protection schemes as
a matter of policy. I personally dislike *any* form of protection.

For the people who purchase our products, it is simply not fair to
require them to jump through hoops to use their software (they will
unfortunately go through enough of them as they work with system and
hardware changes!).

For the people who attempt to pirate the software, copy protection
is usually nothing more than a weekend challenge (something usually
looked forward to). If the copy protection does work, we believe that
only 10-30% of the pirating individuals will ever purchase the software.

Thus, there is very little "psychological" reason to protect software.
Further, I suspect that if one were to compare the potential revenues
from pirators that were convinced to purchase, against the potential
losses from 1) people being turned off by protection & 2) the inability
for users to "borrow" software to try it out, one would find that the
case for copy protection loses on a financial basis as well!

On the other hand, unfortunately, the paying customers will carry
the burden of the lost revenues due to pirating. Since a company must
establish its pricing on *projected* sales, and these projections
are based upon "paying customers", the price will carry the "cost"
of the lost sales to pirators. This is unavoidable if a company is
to succeed (let alone profit). However, there are a *large* number
of factors that determine a product's price.

tim.


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Tim Endres                |  time@ice.com
ICE Engineering           |  uupsi!ice.com!time
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