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Like every developer blog worth of this name, it needs an article on software piracy. This is going to be rather long. I’ll start by talking about the causes of software piracy, its effects and what we can (and cannot) do to limit its damages.

What are the causes of software piracy?

In my opinion the causes of software piracy are to be found in the concept itself of software and intangible property. These concepts are simply new and many people need to understand that while pirating is not theft in its classical way is nonetheless wrong and hurts development (and developers). Some computer illiterates don’t even know what means creating a software, and have no way of giving it a value. Its not their fault. Remember that it took centuries for people to understand that killing each other for honor matters is not the right thing to do (and it hasn’t been fully understood yet, dare i say).

Another cause lies in the strange conception that everybody must use professional/full of features software to accomplish their tasks. How many pirated Adobe® Photoshop® installations on home computers have you seen in your life? Is obvious that a 13 year old, or anybody who is not using it for work or main hobby is not going to pay the high price of such a tool. What is not obvious is why they should use a complex, powerful software to do simple things for which simpler and affordable alternatives exists. We’ll see the effects of this attitude in details later.

Which are the effects of software piracy?

One obvious effect of software piracy is to hurt sales. I however do not think that this alone is a big problem in itself. Some people won’t just pay. We developers have to understand that we are pioneering in a new field and the rules are not well understood by everybody yet. We must live with that and not start counting how much money we would have done if nobody pirated our software (it will hurts us).

The big problem of software piracy however is another, less obvious and far more dangerous. Software piracy creates monopolies. Have you ever noticed that the software industry is basically the only one were competition is almost inexistant? That’s because with piracy anybody can “afford” every tool. If everybody could have a Ferrari, would you still see Matiz around? For example when someone pirates Adobe® Photoshop® is hurting all the companies and individuals who makes cheaper products, often easier to use to most people, being not targeted to professionals. So piracy is often one of causes for little companies to quickly die, or if they are lucky being bought by a big corporation. We all know why monopolies are bad, and in the software field they are particularly hard to get rid of (but i’ll talk about this in another post).

So, what to do against piracy?

First i’ll talk about what NOT to do against piracy. The common belief is that a very strong protection avoids high rates of piracy. This would be true if anybody had to circumvent those protections by themselves, but unfortunately once one person does it, everybody can get it. So avoid using strange things like online activations which only make the honest people angry. The pirate won’t see that at all when (s)he downloads the cracked application. Those things are annoying, and often lead people to other software, or even to the “dark side”. An extreme example of this are games. Games tend to require the media to be inserted to play. This is annoying to a very high degree and many gamers will wonder how to work around that, and finally download a patch to “fix” that. The next time a game is out, some may think “hey, the patch also avoided the need to insert a serial code, why should i bother paying again?”. This is not the right way of thinking, but the protection in this case induced MORE piracy! So don’t be too strict about enforcing your EULA. If an individual has 2 computers you can bet he’s probably going to use your application on both with one license. Don’t try to check how many computers your application is installed on, people have 2 brains anyway, they’ll probably use only one copy at once and the computer on which they use it shouldn’t be our business anyway.

Now, what should we do to avoid piracy? While there is little we can do by technical means, we can do something by social means. Try to be open to suggestions and responsive your customers. Be professional, but do not answer to emails with scripts. You could open a blog or a forum, let user know about your efforts, your thoughts, let people see there are humans behind software. The idea is to create a sort of community around your products/company. This won’t eliminate piracy, but should lower by letting people understand you do your best and you care about them. The users of the community should be your loved ones, because they support you both financially and morally and often come up with good ideas. While all this shouldn’t be normally needed, remember my premise, we are pioneering in a field where the rules are not well understood yet, and the responsibility of educating the population is also on us.

Posted on Monday, December 11th, 2006 at 19:54 under Opinions & Thoughts.
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