Piracy is illegal, therefore if I can’t afford it then I do without or find a cheaper/free legal alternative.
You can never condone stealing bread from someone else’s mouth … but, at the same time, I doubt that piracy actually represents a huge impact on any software company’s bottom line. They are dealing with customers, each of whom is making an investment in the software that they use to do their business. They make contractual commitments (for service, support, upgrades, etc.) and they “say ‘how high?’ when ‘I, The Mouse,’ say ‘jump!’,” and so on. :yes:
They make a very good living that way. (Sometimes.)
A certain number of individuals will steal licenses, trading unlock-codes in much the same way that people trade cheat-codes for games. Since most software “phones home” when it is unlocked, the companies probably have a good idea of the actual extent to which this is happening. But, although it does not represent revenue to which they are rightfully entitled, I frankly expect that it does not represent a significant loss. When the time comes for the would-be pirate to do work legally, a license will be required and will be bought. No one in the business is going to waste their time with pirated copies … nor permit anyone in their employ or under their contract to use non-licensed tools.
“Meanwhile, there is Blender.” It won’t teach you what product-X does in exactly the way that product-X does it, but it will teach you what product-X does. And that’s one reason why the industry is so interested in it, whether or not they directly use it in a product.
This is exactly the point I wish more people would wake up and realize - that for the same price the masses are spending on mediocre locked-down software, we could instead invest in free open software that is available to all and raises the human quality of life.
Any major motion picture studio could approach The Blender Foundation tomorrow and say:
Hi guys, our accounting department did the math, and we realized that - for less than the price of the 20 Maya license seats our team would require - we could instead pay you X amount of money to add Y feature to Blender that we need for our pipeline and we could save money and also as a convenient side effect help bring a new feature to Blender.
Sometimes I have to wonder if the problem fundamentally lies in human psychology. People can easily understand: “if we don’t pay them we can’t get the thing we want”. People have a harder time thinking outside of the box far enough to grasp: “we could use the money to instead invest in something everyone would benefit from.”
With open source software the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. With commercial software you get only what you pay for - or rather the software company only puts as much value into their product as is necessary to get you to write that check.
yeah, I tried to pirate blender once,
I could not crack it .
I ended up with parrot puree’.
poor little guy.
okay i don’t like it when people claim that programs are tools, yes they are tools but not in the same way. programs may be like a hammers in that you can use it to make something, but it is not right to steal a hammer from a store because the hammer has a insane price. when you buy a hammer your paying to own it, when you buy a program your paying to use it. no one buys a program they only pay to use it so it is more like renting then buying.
so is piracy wrong, i believe it is but i am not going to be mad at you for pirating, that is your choice.
if you want more open source, then we need to make a need for it.
use Blinder, Gimp, and Audacity. there FREEEEEEE :yes:
There are infinite number of hammers, though you are not allowed to use any. Bang with your head!
Look at the real pirates… but yeah, who cares. Is a small group of nuts crushing your lovely intelligence.
We all know nothing is free, but to forbid use to whom cannot afford… that is wrong.
It’s more complex than that. I can’t afford an F1 either but I don’t need one. Only F1 drivers need them. Some endeavors require more resources than others. Egalitarian ideals just don’t make practical sense. There is always going to be some form of disparity. We just need to realize that some of it is useful depending on what it provides for society. Maya is a tool for those who create entertainment content that you consume. Somehow it goes full circle.
The economic system is changing fundamentally. I’m not really that concerned about disparity. I’m more concerned about basic needs being met. That is really where we focus our moral arguments.
Taking a hammer from a store isn’t exactly the same as pirating software. The hammer itself is made from physical materials that the provider paid for, if you take a hammer you would otherwise not have at all the provider is no longer able to sell that particular hammer and therefore loses what money he spent on the parts.
When you download pirated software that you would otherwise not have purchased the provider hasn’t actually lost anything because he can still sell that same application to those willing to pay for it. If the provider were able to prevent you from obtaining a pirated version of the software the provider gains nothing because you still won’t buy it and instead just live without it so either way the provider has gained and lost nothing.
Now add in the cost to protect the software from piracy and the provider is losing money in the attempt to prevent it from being pirated because he is not recovering lost revenue, just spending money to keep it out of the hands of those who wouldn’t be paying him either way.
That being said I don’t see why anyone would go through the trouble of pirating Max or Maya when they could just use Blender. In that case piracy might actually help Autodesk because Blender is a competing product, if they can’t get Max for free then they’ll use Blender instead.
Autodesk would probably do well to offer a free version of their software for educational and/or noncommercial use.
they do lose potential customers and
If the provider were able to prevent you from obtaining a pirated version of the software the provider gains nothing because you still won’t buy it and instead just live without it so either way the provider has gained and lost nothing.
yes,yes you would buy it if the option to pirate it didn’t exist
I disagree fxfxd, with music and movies maybe sure, but I think a lot of people pirating software like Maya simply cannot afford it so if they don’t pirate it there’s no way they could buy it.
Vendors and law makers should probably stop trying to treat software like it were physical merchandice. They’re not the same thing, software vendors would fare better, in my opinion, to come up with new ways to market their products.
The basic concept of buying and selling digital products is still exactly the same as buying and seling a physical product, heck the digital goods selling is more or less an extension of the basic concepts of commerce.
Back in the 90’s the ‘digital’ goods were actually shipped on physical media and came with physical products (manuals ect…), the concept of an all-digital storefront was simply not possible until the dawn of high internet speeds along with advances in server technology. You’re telling me that we should just yank the rug out from under the digital vendors and force them to make use of a system completely foreign to them (not to mention they do not know what that system is yet).
The bottom line is that small vendors especially has been hurt by piracy with some of them even being forced out of business, the idea that piracy doesn’t hurt anyone because it simply makes a copy is simply not true.
This is why I don’t like justifications for ones actions.
It is hard to admit to ones self that they are not the perfect example of how a person should be. We have layers and layers of our brain wired to see social debts and feel things like shame and rage when social rules are broken. And some people find they can lie to themselves and by believing their own lie they can do some things they could not before. And hell if you convince yourself you have done 2/3’s of the work needed to convince the people around you.
Now I am not going to say do or do not pirate. Trust me I’ve paid good money for software that turned out be be utter piles of rancid shit. And I fully respect that when you pirate a software that you are indeed taking food out of someones mouth. And when I say this keep in mind I have had discussions with professional, People paid to make cg content. And more then a few of them use pirated software to earn their bread.
I won’t judge someone for stealing an IP, And that is what it is. Theft of IP is something that is as old as writing itself. the library of alexandria in egypt back in the old BCE days use to make copies of everything that ships had as they were docked in that city.
Now Understand, I will judge people who need to make excuses for their actions and justify how their theft is not what it actually is. Theft.
“And I fully respect that when you pirate a software that you are indeed taking food out of someones mouth.” Ya right, thats a good one. That is a joke isn’t it?
Who cares if the poor steal from the rich, the rich steal from the poor every day why not talk about that?
All the better to prove my point, they can’t afford to live with piracy and can’t afford to combat it or the anti-piracy tactics aren’t working. The only other option is to find another way to market and/or monetize their product.
In an economic sense, there is a social agreement based upon the give and take. It’s supposed to be mutually beneficial. This agreement is necessary for systemic function. If one is to argue against aggregation of wealth and markets, hypocrisy will not be of much help.
Piracy breaks that agreement.
The only argument that could outweigh that is the old “poor man stealing a loaf of bread” argument. We’re not talking about necessities here though.
So the solution is to let the pirates win and let them decide how software is sold?
That would be like letting the drug dealers and the rest of the black market dictate the direction that the economy is going to go in. They will still find a way to get around the monetization because some people do not believe in a monetary-based economy (and forcing it now would be impossible without causing mass destruction in livelyhoods and innovation).
So let’s not only make everything free, but make everything legal as well (if I want to install a nuclear missile in my backyard then I should have the right to do that). Things would devolve into utter chaos if we don’t keep the lines drawn in the same position. Eventually the black market would become the only market, and they also don’t believe in regulations of any kind either so good luck in finding which products won’t kill you.
Okay so then what? Let all those small businesses you’re talking about go out of business because they don’t want to feel like they lost by changing their method of monetization?
I mean Microsoft’s new Windows file scanning and stuff can probably be used to combat piracy, and probably will, but it’s going to cost Microsoft money to to operate that so I doubt they’ll offer their services to other businesses for free which puts those small businesses that can’t afford it out of luck yet again.
Moreover I’m sure those crafty pirates will find a way to distribute a version of Windows 10 stripped of any monitoring services.
The issue with that is that the would-be pirates simply do not believe in taking part in any monetization at all, they want things to be completely free (support, plugins, and everything) and some of the more radical groups even wish there was a way to force said software into becoming open source as well (even if they have to reverse engineer the package and extract the code).
Basically, when you start engaging in compromise in this case, the pirates will see that and demand more and more of it until there’s literally nothing for you (ie. you can no longer make a living on the development of the product and don’t expect the pirates to pay you to keep writing code).
That may be true, but that’s only considering those doing the actual hacking. The people actually using the software might be less likely to download pirated software if there are legal ways to obtain the software because it’s less risky. Other than that what’s your solution? I mean trying to talk the pirates into seeing things your way isn’t going to work I’m sure.
It’s not like they haven’t already heard and disagreed with your point of view a thousand times over.
I see you are well along in justifying your own world view. See this is what I am talking about. If you ever have too sue someone over a copyright infringement I do hope some diligent lawyer finds this post. It will serve nicely as a building block of implied consent defense for the defendant.