Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!tank!uxc!garcon!uxa.cso.uiuc.edu!jb10320
From: jb10320@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Jawaid Bazyar)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re: Piracy
Message-ID: <1065@garcon.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 19 May 89 16:31:41 GMT
References: <8905190127.AA18493@obsolete.UUCP>
Sender: news@garcon.cso.uiuc.edu
Reply-To: jb10320@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Jawaid Bazyar)
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Lines: 51

To: nazgul@obsolete.UUCP

In article <8905190127.AA18493@obsolete.UUCP> you write:
>
>         One facet of the piracy issue that I'd like to bring up is the
>    question of early version penalties (EVP - a.k.a. upgrade fees).  When a
>    software item is upgraded to a newer version the same suggested retail
>    price is kept.  People with older versions usually must pay an early version
>    penalty in order to trade in their old version for the new one.  These
>...
>
>When was the last time you went to a car dealer and complained
>because they wouldn't give you this years version of your car for
>30% of the price you paid for the old one?

   We're dealing with two totally different forms of 'product' here. Software
can be easily duplicated, cars cannot. What the software houses need to ask
themselves is "What can we offer the buyer that the pirate does not get?"
"What can we sell him for a REASONABLE price that will make him buy (not copy)?"
Pirating is to the software publisher what going to the dealer down the road
is for cars.  Your analogy is inappropriate.

>[stuff deleted]
>the amount of work that went into a particular product.  However
>believe me, the amount of work that goes into an upgraded product
>is usually equal to or greater than the amount in the original.
>With the original you could do things anyway you wanted, with the
>upgrade you have to maintain compatibility (even when you did it
>wrong the first time), plus fix all the bugs that were found, but
>*without* creating any new ones.  Starting over from scratch would
>often be much simpler.
>					-kee
>-------

    I take it you're not a programmer.  If they designed it properly in the
first place, you wouldn't have to start from scratch, wouldn't have many bugs,
wouldn't have to worry about upward compatibility (ever hear of Abstract Data
Types?).  If it WASN'T designed well, then people are paying for a product
just as useless as a lemon car (to stick with the ever-popular "let's
compare piracy to totally inappropriate situations").

    I think a major distinction has to be made simply because megabytes
of computer information can be duplicated cheaply and quickly.  Attitudes
about intellectual "property" need adjusting. Only then can this industry
truly mature.
===============================================================================
jawaid bazyar			   "The history of the world is the history of	
jb10320@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu	    the warfare between secret societies."
Junior/Computer Engineering @          - Ishmael Reed, Mumbo-Jumbo
 Univ. of Illinois
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