WAREZ COLLABORATION

[Midiworks]

Sure, they don't have PCs but they don't drink Coke either. (India)



Not more than 500 meter from where I sit right now,
people live like this...



Time to think, to start thinking different.

[Kim Lajoie]

Some years back, I was lucky enough to work with a really good electronic composer. She wrote a lot of the music that really fired my passion to do music, when I was young. She stopped making records and focused on scoring industrial (and other) films. When I asked her why -- she told me about some college tours she did, where the excited student who picked her up at the airport typically said something like "I got all your records -- and all of my friends have tapes of them!" The students could never figure out why this bothered the composer. When finances got tight (the composer never made much of anything from records, which is partly a typical record company story), she found work that would pay the bills, and stopped making records for a while. She's started composing seriously again, which is great -- but the 'lost years' are a loss to the world.

Kinda the same way it bothers me that my sister (16-year-old) has no qualms about burning CDs from mp3's, and charing them with her friends.

And it bethers me especially since I'm a composer. How can I get through to her?

Oops, this is kinda dragging off-topic...

Forever,




Kim.

[dburgan]

if it's wrong to be black and white about issues of serious life and death inequities, and social injustice, than certainly one should not then be black and white about the inevitable results of those inequities.

Well, let's separate wheat from chaff ... of course, many of the poorest nations don't participate in 'free trade' at all, and are lucky if any crumbs make their way down to them in the first place. Those are the nations that I am seriously concerned about - the nations where starvation is a real concern. I don't know how this world can tolerate starvation in our midst ... to me, that is the real tragedy.

But, nations like Russia, China, Taiwain, India, etc. are all nations that are benefiting from free trade, as well as suffering from it. I guess that's my point.

[benski]

Just some random thought on piracy (from the point of view of a developer and a computer user for almost 20 years).

Piracy's effect on price:
The old saying that piracy drives up software prices is FALSE. A pirated version of your software is competition with a legit version. This causes the developer to lower his prices (to make it less attractive to pirate). Since this also lowers sales, it's a big loss to a developer. Rampant piracy basically turns software into a commodity. This is great for the user, horrible for the developer. This leads to less software innovation. Like the character in Yellow Submarine, widespread piracy will "suck itself in" - a short-term gain for the user leads to a long-term loss for the industry.

Piracy as a means to ruin your competitor:
For larger software companies, there is a silent understanding that piracy is a way to compete with smaller "lite" software packages. There's not an active move to do this, but you have to somewhere if there's a passive reluctance to stop piracy. If you have a choice between a $50 lo-frills Office package, and a $500 do-it-all Office package, you may opt for the $50 version if you just need to do basic word processing. But given a choice between a FREE (pirated) do-it-all Office package and a $50 lo-frills, the choice is obvious. The big company isn't losing a sale (the user wasn't going to buy their software anyway), but the smaller firm loses out!

Will they buy it?
I think there's three kinds of piraters
1) Ripoff artists who sell faked copies at computer shows, swap meets, out of the back of a trunk, on ebay, etc. These people are definitely criminals and there is little room for justification here.
2) Individuals and small businesses who are trying to get away with not paying. I've heard somewhere that 80% of CAD shops who use AutoCAD only have one licensed version of AutoCAD. They just install it several times. These people are hurting software companies because they would pay if they had to, but instead they can get away with pirating.
3) The individual who is curious about a peice of software. These are the so-called "victimless" piraters. These are the people who weren't going to buy the software anyway. To a certain extent, it's almost free marketing for a software company. I doubt Adobe Photoshop would be as popular if budding graphic artists couldn't get free copies. This isn't too much different than software companies which sell cheap "student" versions.

Just some thoughts. Obviously the controversy is about #3!

[MusicGeek]

Thanks for the thoughtful reply.

MusicGeek: That is a sad story and I am defintely sorry that your things didn't turn out the way you wanted.

I have a feeling though that you where quite early in the game, maybe too early to make this profitable for various reasons (one appearently that back then almost nobody bought software of any kind).

Another thing is that if you would have bundled your software with your own proprietary midi interface, not supporting the other guys card (let's face it, they really made a profit of their *and* your work), you could be still in the game...

Maybe so. I switched to other parts of the music industry for awhile, then got involved in post production software. A $200K automated mixing console makes a pretty good dongle!

Making our own proprietary MIDI I/F would have been pretty hard, at least in the mid-80's. We were using an interface with its own micro, which did timestamping, scheduling, tempo management etc. all by itself. That's the only way we could get good performance out of a 4.77 MHz PC XT. (And MHz is not a typo!). It would have been very expensive and time consuming for us to duplicate that -- and besides, we didn't want to compete with MIDI interface products, we wanted to complement them, and show what they could do.

In any case, I did music and pro-audio work until about two years ago, and was very much 'still in the game'. Now I'm building open-source software development tools, and doing music SW on the side, for fun (like I said in my first post, I'm hoping to getting something cool out soon -- I looked at this forum because I need to learn more about VSTs etc.)

But the point here is a different one (at least in my opinion): The question is if it is a good idea to punish a legitimate user with sometimes draconian protection schemes when there is no music software in history that wasn't cracked within weeks or even days after release? You have to acknoledge that copy protections just don't work.

I wasn't arguing for draconian protection schemes (or otherwise); far from it. I remember trying to get the Cubase dongle to work with my MusicQuest 2PortSe interface, all on the same parallel port -- fuggedaboutit! My current sequencer is not copy protected at all (and I think it's best-of-breed partly because the developers didn't waste effort on tricky protections schemes). Frankly, I don't know what the answer is; my best hope is for people to realize why pirating software hurts the community (and them) in the long run.

Fact is that there are actually many people out there nowadays that are willing to honor the developers and buy the software they use. What works is when the developers have an active releationship with their customers and offer regular updates or goodies to their registered users. It's stupid to concentrate your efforts on copy protections that don't work and be mad about the warez users, they are not your customers and may never be. Concentrate on the paying ones and make their life happy, don't punish them!

100% right. Absolutely.

Thanks again for a thoughtful reply

-- MusicGeek