Software Piracy Article

Ok, what I want to know is...

Suppose (just for the sake of argument) that you, um, happen to live on a yacht in the South China seas and you hijack international oil shipments with the help of your gang of heavily armed Vietnamese desperados.

And suppose, further, that onboard, along with your neato satellite radar monitoring system you've got Net access.

And also suppose that using your Net access, you pirate software.

But the only software you pirate is Pirate sims and adventures.

So you pirate a bunch of old 386 and 486 era text-based adventures, and maybe a Sierra pirate game for good measure, and your only requirement of a game is that it involve sea-faring pirates (the pre-digital variety, with parrots and one peg leg).

So you're a pirate pirating pirate games, right? And further, a latterday pirate pirating oldtime piracy.

Here's my only question.

If you delete the game within 24 hours, do you get to keep the oil tanker? ;)

my outlook on piracy:

i only warez stuff that:

a. i would never have bought anyway (kiss: psycho circus).
b. i think i deserve a free upgrade for (windows 98).
c. i'm considering buying (unreal tournament).
d. i could never possibly afford (photoshop).

if i really like something, i'll buy it. actually a and c go together. kind of hypocritical, but i support what i like.

pup (hypocrit)

I agree with this article 110%. The only way to make money is to create a game so good that people will buy it.

If your game sucks, it will be pirated, played for 10 minutes, uninstalled, placed in the CD folder, and forgotten about.

If your game rocks, it will be purchased and played to no end.

End of story.

-X

Interesting, a little overenthusiastic with the 'inputting an incorrect code could result in a hard drive format' stuff. Of course there have been some shareware programs which would do stuff like that if they detected a serial code made by a cracker.

What it boils down to is that there are two forms of piracy, always have been, always will.
1. Playground piracy - Kid gets game for Commodore 64 on tape. Tries to copy on tape player at home, give to friend, the copy doesn't work. Now kid gets game for Hewlett Packard system with bonus CDRW, tries to copy CD, it doesn't work. Kid has no idea why, no particular inclination to find out, forgets about it.
2. Serious piracy - Kid does have inclination to find out, finds out he can download cracks and so on, etc. etc. ends up handing round free copies to people at school or wherever.
(3. Commercial piracy, but I won't bother talking about that here).

Software companies can only ever hope to prevent playground piracy. From the earliest days of the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum when the first cracking groups appeared, serious piracy has only ever been one step behind, because if you can copy protect something, it can be unprotected, it's that simple.

First. and stuff.