Your thoughts for my College Research Paper

Hey everyone,

I am majoring in MIS and have to write a research paper. The topic i have picked is software piracy and possible solutions in over coming this problem. If you can contribute web links to articles on this or have some thoughts of your own please post.

One of my own thoughts on how to solve this was to create multi-part programs. Run a client that might come on a cd that people would install on their desktops, and run a server that holds the other part of the program. Seeing that more and more people have high speed internet this should not be too much of a problem. Anyways, looking forward to your insights.

http://www.againsttcpa.com/

Interesting site. It's against a bill that would force computer makers to install a chip that would prevent running software that the TCPA (Trusted Computing Platform Alliance) does not want it to run.

Hope it helps

Ya this is going to help me alot. Thanks.

Some words by a buddy of mine:

I think a response from me would go like this. Piracy in all cases usually is a bad thing because you are taking someones hard work, but on the other hand it can be a tool for those learning the pirated subject. As long as the person doesnt use it for making money. It also may be in some cases a tool that the pirate uses to promote the product and hopefully when the person uses it for business buys a legal copy. Kind of like what I did with microsoft stuff. I use it and am comfortable using the product and telling others while I personally purchased the action pack to be legal.

Well this is a complicated issue. You sure will find several points of view, and you must pick yours before start writing.

My personal opinion is oriented not to find ways to make it harder for the software users to run the programs, but to find a better way to make people WANT to buy a copy of if.

Why?... well, because no matter what you do to prevent people who didn't buy, from using the software, others will come with a "hack" to override your magic trick. And in the meanwhile, actual buyers will have to deal with your complicated "firewalls" in order to use what they paid for.

What could be the solution? Give a BUNCH of extras to the buyers, and try to make it worth to purchase a licence. If we use our creativity to find better ways to make our customers happier and our licences cheaper, instead of finding better ways to secure our software, we will soon have a great product with a very reasonable price and lots of extra (and useful) services that will make people think twice before downloading an illegal copy.

What could that services be? User forums, 800 (free) support lines, discounts (or free passes) for training courses, add-ons, lifetime updates, user contests, free certifications, and whatever you can think of to give people a reason to buy...

Well that's what I think.

Manoloweb

wow thanks man, great insight. I will be using some of this content in my paper for sure.

It's a good idea, but there are far too many downsides to it that would surely render the idea useless.

The biggest of all being that there are still too many people on non-broadband internet accounts, not to mention those that have no access to the internet outside of work -- I personally know many people in that situation.

Forcing these people to connect to a server to download the "remains" will work for those who have broadband, but will surely piss off the ones who don't.

Just my $0.02.

good point there. Let me brain storm a bit. I will some up with more ideas. Or help me find a solution. Cause i need that too.

This could also pertain to file sharing [music] and the RIAA. Personally, I came from the age of shareware, where you try the product before you buy, and I fully support that. I would much rather try a product before I purchase it, that way I'm not wasting my money on a license on which I'm not going to use, and which I can't return once it's opened.

I can entirely see where the pirate comes from, not wanting to pay for something until they know that they like it or not (some don't pay at all, I understand, however most do)

I know that every single MP3 I have, I have a legal copy of the origional album that it came from (CD, Casette, etc) And if the RIAA ever tried to come after me I'd be able to show each and every album... and I know that I've bought albums because of sampled songs that I enjoyed.

Just my $.02

LOL, boy you guys keep adding your .02 and i will be rich someday. Thanks for those comments, you bring some good points to the table as well.

Most interesting subject, I think it's a little harder to answer than most and the responses I have read are most excellent. Now to the meat of it, morally speaking let me say it is wrong to steal. With that said it should also be wrong to give people the ability to do so and let me add you send a mixed signal when you do so. What do I mean by that? Well let's take a look at DVD burners. I would consider myself a power user and as a web developer I have occasion to utilize graphics, audio, and video. My workstation has 140GBs in harddrive space with 95GB being consumed by projects, archives, and applications.

Philips boosts DVD capacity

Philips, Europe's largest maker of consumer electronics and lighting, said Friday that its new dual-layer technology raised the capacity of recordable DVDs (DVD+R) to 8.5GB from 4.7GB for single-layer DVD discs.

Now even for back up purposes it would still take 12 DVDs to back up all of my data besides cost, time, and the media being non rewritable it does not lend itself to being a good backup solution. Well let's see how many people do you suppose are going to use this media for home movies. How about audio archives o.k. but technically that's copyrighted material. Copying VHS movies is illegal and requires in most cases additional hardware. I said all that to say this DVD burners are ideally suited for one thing copying DVD movies. Now let's look at Sony as a company it produces movies, music, cassette tapes, VHS tapes, CDs, cassette recorders, VHS recorders, and last but not least DVD burners.

Sony’s Site

“Sony, the inventor of some of today’s most popular formats including CD, DVD, MO and floppy disk delivers quality, reliability and versatility to meet your storage requirements.”

So I ask you just what is it that you’re suppose to be storing as an average consumer. Without a doubt DVD burners are being mass marketed to the average consumer. Let me have some real fun now you know that option that allows you to copy a radio station directly to a cassette didn't the manufacturer of that radio know that gave the consumer the ability to copy copyrighted material? I know I am not the only one who knows that Broadcast Television programming is copyrighted. So can someone explain TiVO to me? How confused can they be about its intended usage?

The preceding may or not explain the consumer’s viewpoint on copyrighted material. I can say this I feel their confusion. Let’s focus on computer programs, I believe it’s hard for the average consumer to grasp the fact that they purchased the right to use something and not ownership, the American shopper personifies the term consumer, we consume. Yet when the same product fails to meet our needs and we want to return it, now all of a sudden ownership seems to have transferred to you the implied lease can not be cancelled. Since I seem to be heading down grievance lane, having been a Network Administrator I often wondered why in a new release manufacturer’s deemed it necessary to arbitrarily rename and or move services, options, and settings. Were they trying to sell me yet another technical manual? Or were they trying to keep me beholden to their product by making the learning curve of switching to a competing product at an unsatisfactory level? Or is my data now captured in a proprietary format.

Cost of ownership I am sure I have over two hundred CD programs of various sorts most of which are useless to me under my current system configuration. This is what I do know I have spent personally somewhere in the neighborhood of $20,000 on hardware alone on my personal system in the past seven years, software I couldn’t begin to tell you the cost. I can tell you a thing or two about incompatibility issues between hardware and hardware, software and hardware, and software and software. Copyright infringement ha the music industry as far as I can tell is still doing well charges more for a CD that’s cheaper than a tape to produce. The movie industry well let me say I buy my fair share of DVDs, after I purchased my first CD burner my music CD purchases increased from 0 to at least once a week because I could compile quality music the way I wanted to hear it.

Let’s not forget the old adage necessity is the mother of invention try they will try they may but if you restrict creativity you have death “TCPA” is a death sentence to those involved yes they might be the biggest and the best but I suggest the free enterprise system will take care of them. Or on the other hand For the most part Crackers are doing what they do for the fairness of it all. When you make it totally profitable to do so they’ll be inviting, a totally new element into the ball game, so be careful for what you ask for. My personal feelings are for the most part consumers have had to put up with a lot of mediocrity from software developers for whatever reasons but I know this it’s not in their best interest to produce the best product possible or why would you buy their next release? Just thought I’d add some things to think about.

A couple of points here.

You have to look at WHY people pirate software.

One reason is to try it out first. This is what I do. For instance, I used Hotdog 5 for awhile to see if I liked using it. I did so I bought it and then bought the upgrade to 6.5.

I was also looking for an FTP client that did everything without much hassle. After trying 8 I believe I have found one, FlashFXP, which does want I want. I will be registering/buying a copy.

I have been evaluating Mail Washer and I find that it works exceptionally well in reducing the amount of spam email I receive. I use this so I've sent off my money to the author to register it.

The biggest hurdle for me and a lot of end users is paying out good money for a piece of software or game that is rubbish or doesn't do what it's supposed to etc.

I tried the game Vietcong. I liked it so I bought it. I certainly won't be buying Halo.

Another point in favour of unofficial copies of games or software is that it GREATLY assists in the proliferation of said software.

Look at the Playstation. Because chipped PS1 machines allowed the playing of out of region games then it helped PS1 to be the market leader.

Look back at the market leading consoles. The ones that had the greatest share of the market in console sales AND game sales were the consoles that allowed an easy method of copying the games.

Sony, Microsoft and other software publishers are aware of this. Look at the Tribes franchise. Tribes 1 was easy to copy, it spread like wildfire and everyone loved it. Tribes 2 comes along requiring a legitimate key forcing people to buy it. Thus Tribes 2 was VERY successful because of the marketing snow job done with Tribes 1.

Despite the cries of millions of dollars in lost revenue the software publishers with some common sense understand the place for pirated copies.

I'm not condoning the theft of software, however, I do support the try before you buy principle.

Software businesses budget for lost profits through piracy. Do you think Adobe expects every 15 year old kid in his basement to purchase a $700 version of Photoshop? Does Microsoft honestly expect grandma to buy $600 full version of Office 2003?

They take the loss because they know they'll make up for it though other businesses. Any idea the sour publicity that would result if a large financial institution, or school, were to get caught with software piracy?

Personally, i believe in fair use. If i'm installing Macromedia Flash to play around with it on my little home site just to impress my girlfriend, am I going to pay the $700 for a legal cd of? Not likely... HOWEVER, if i'm running my own business designing flash animations for profit, am I going to pay? You bet I will.

Somebody brought up music piracy, and I think that's a whole new can of worms, and i'll save that thought for another rant =)

Just came across this article, it may help you:

FCC approves Internet anti-piracy tool
http://www.salon.com/tech/wire/2003...flag/index.html

This discussion is spreading nicely, and some good points have been brought up.

MadCowDzz brought up a few good points...

The cost for certain software packages today is unbelieveably high.

Here's another scenario:

A budding developer is attempting to start his own business. He decides to evaluate his options, and comes across Microsoft technologies.

Have you seen the costs associated with SQL Server and Visual Studio.Net?! Not to mention Windows 2000 Server license costs.

It's no wonder people are copying and sharing software. It's unaffordable for most people.

I do agree with what was said about the "Try before you buy&