Overture Search Terms Showcase Piracy Desire 177
swfnews guy writes: "swfnews.com (a slashcode based site) today published this article regarding how Overture's search term suggested tool can be used to see the desired piracy of a particular piece of software. I find it disturbing that more people searched for the crack for Flash Mx than for tutorials on how to use it."
Piracy Spiral (Score:4, Interesting)
Programs like WS_FTP have the right idea. If you are a business user or a company looking to use the software you have to pay up. But if you are a home user who isn't profiting off of the use of the software, then its absolutely free.
If companies like Microsoft, Adobe, and Macromedia provided free licenses, or even cheap sub 100$ licenses to individuals not seeking to profit from the use of the software I guarantee they would see an extreme decrease in piracy. There are those cheap people who wont pay 50$ for a very powerful piece of software, but there are a lot of people like me, college students, who can't afford a 500$ program that they need for a class.
Software price increases because of piracy and vice versa. One day it will either end where all software is pirated because nobody can afford it, or all software is cheap(er). In the end it doesn't look good for the developers.
Nothing new... (Score:5, Interesting)
People have been saying this since the mid-90s where we were downloading "warez" from BBS's.
Piracy could be mostly stopped (Score:4, Interesting)
Offering noncommercial use licenses on full software products, at a NOMINAL[1] cost,
while aggressively pursuing companies that violate the noncommerical licenses.
This would allow the kids who want to play with ($software), make wacky animations, programs and such to do so without breaking the law, while charging the people that make money off of flash the full license fee.
There's even an added benefit - a lot more people will learn ($software), and will potentially become paying customers in the future (this especially applies to younger people).
Educational software is not the answer, as it's only open to students, and often times is *still* too highly priced for many people that just want to fool around.
I think piracy would be greatly reduced if the software companies would recognize that a lot of the warezing is being done because the price is too high for people that just want to 'play' and not actually do any for-profit work.
:wq
[1] under $100. Just media with PDF'd docs.
Big deal (Score:3, Interesting)
As for people searching for Warez via search engines, that's mostly useless. Even using cross referencing, its difficult to get a good Warez page. 99% of all "warez" pages are really fronts for pop-up porno operations. When it comes to Warez, you really need to "be in" to be able to access it.
According to Google (Score:3, Interesting)
Keyword Clicks/ Cost-Per- Cost/
Day Click Day
---
flash 660.0 $0.19 $123.42
crack 690.0 $0.12 $77.55
porn 1600.0 $0.24 $368.12
sex 1600.0 $0.24 $376.00
cowboy neal 0.1 $0.08 $0.02
flash mx crack <0.1 $0.11 $0.00
By that logic, I would have more success buying the keywords "cowboy neal" than with "flash mx crack." That's what scares me. Try it yourself [google.com].
Re:Of course (Score:2, Interesting)
I downloaded and installed the full version of Office 2000 and went to town. What did I do with it? Learned how to use Access by setting up an addressbook, and I used Word to write a few papers. Would I have bought it? No way, if I needed to write the paper that badly I could have done it on the Performa 6300 that I built this machine to replace. It had a legit copy of clarisworks that was fine.
I was the first one of us to get DSL so I was the super-leech to everyones ftp servers. I burned CDs of everying, win2k advanced server, datacenter server, 3d studio max, bunches of movies, who knows how many gigs of mp3s, etc etc etc. I figure I probably burned somewhere around a thousand CDs in high school. What of all that software do I still use? None of it, I run gentoo, open office, the gimp, etc. I never could/would have bought any of the software I pirated.
We were just a bunch of computer geeks who didn't have much in the way of social lives trying to prove that we had a bigger dick than the other guy cuz "I had win2k 2 days b4 j00." Everyone who says "pirating BILLIONS!!!!" is off their rocker, every pirate I've ever known has binders and binders of CDs, and they rarely even INSTALL any of it. Besides, the stuff we realy wanted you couldnt pirate well (starcraft, CS, etc)
Annoying copy protection => Crack required. (Score:2, Interesting)
IMHO, there is another reason why people go looking for cracks.
It is because they are FSCK'ed off with the annoying copy protection on the legal version they have already paid for.
A friend of mine is quite into PC gaming, especial first person shooters, He has brought about 20 games in the last couple of years. (I have seen the retail boxes on his shelves).
He has also downloaded cracks for most of them.
His reason is the original copy protection is inconvenient & annoying. Most games insist that the original CD be in the drive to play, Some require all the CDs to be inserted in succession. Some games don't like his SCSI CD-ROM, and insist that it is disabled (1). When he telephoned tech support for one of the publisher's with this problem, they accused him of being a pirate, and refused to help.
Overall the copy protection detracts from his experience of using the game software, so he improves it by cracking it.
IMHO, my friend has done nothing wrong by cracking software he already owns, but by doing so he has created demand for cracks, and making it more likely that those who have not paid for games will find the cracks they are looking for.
In conclusion, the message for software publishers, is to ease up on copy protection. If users want to copy the software they will find a way, and if the protection is to annoying, ordinary users will want to remove it.
1. Apparently it is possible to create a loop back block device under Win2K using SCSI, and that might be used to emulate a real CD-ROM.