UK's '£1.2bn software pirates' mostly 'blokes under 34' The BSA is again bemoaning the lack of deterrents for software piracy after the commercial worth of unlicensed programs in the UK for 2011 remained at £1.2bn, unchanged on the previous year. This equates to a piracy rate of 26 per cent as more than one in four applications installed on users' machines was illegal, the software …
"The BSA said that as the UK enters a double-dip recession it was vital that the creative sector's intellectual property and contribution to the economy is protected."
Why those weasel-worth,why not: "our research clearly shows that recession's been caused by them nasty pirates!" At least this would give us a laugh.
We reckon that the cost of a production server taking an unexpected dive averages about £5,600. It might be a made-up figure, but it's one that drives a fair number of budgetary decisions around here.
Yesterday there were no server crashes ... kerrr-ching! Look at that, we've "saved" the company over £300 grand (52 prod. servers) in a single day. Surely for that massive saving, the IT department deserves a rise? In fact, there haven't been any unscheduled outages for a couple of weeks now, which puts the IT "savings" at something greater than our departmental budget.
Given how many (ahem) crashes I personally didn't cause last year I can boast a saving to the company of several million. Surely that means HR should employ more IT staff - none of whom cause any crashes, thus saving even more? Strangely, they're not buying it.
However, I'm sure that with their accounting methods the BSA has IT staff coming out of their ears. Even if they count the cost of an outage at much, much less than we do, they will still be in the money by employing more and more people who don't kill their computers.
Most people who are using, eg pirated Photoshop, aren't in a position to pay the full cost of the software. I'm not suggesting that Adobe should be a charity, but pirated Photoshop represents lost sales for companies other than Adobe who make more realistically priced products.
To continue with the same example, it can't hurt Adobe that PS is the de facto industry standard, and that many users will have learnt on pirated copies before joining a legitimate company. If you are going to pirate then money is no object- you aren't going to illegally download a competing image image editor just because it represents better value for money. People learn on PS, companies will buy it, circle repeats. Again, it's Adobe's competitors that loose out when Photoshop is pirated.
Many small digital imaging firms are crying out for things to make tax-deductible. It is because the companies who buy the software don't feel the full price that such software is so expensive in the first place.
Most pirates are men under 35? I would have thought that most people seeking employment in areas requiring pricey software are men under 35. Those over 35 are earning more and have their tax affairs in better order.
It's easy to think, when you make a pirate copy of Microsoft Office, that they won't miss the money; that you aren't really doing Microsoft any harm. But there is an underlying, false assumption, and that is that the company whose product is being copied is the company which is suffering.
A pirate copy of Microsoft Office is not necessarily a lost sale for Microsoft. If piracy were eliminated altogether, so the choices were pay the price or go without, those users most probably would have bought not MS Office, but a less-expensive office suite which nonetheless fulfilled their requirements. A pirate copy of Microsoft Office is very probably a lost sale for one of Microsoft's competitors.
The fact that there is no such software around is due to piracy. Vendors of inexpensive office suites have already been put out of business by piracy. There may not be a single pirate copy of Cheap Office out there; but there doesn't need to be, as long as there are plenty of pirate copies of Microsoft Office.
And of course, Microsoft would rather Fred in the Shed was using a pirate copy of Microsoft Office to write letters, balance his finances and keep track of his CD collection, than a paid-up copy of anything else. Because if Fred in the Shed ever gets a job with a company, he will want them to buy him Microsoft Office because he already knows that.
Big software companies, by tolerating piracy, have effectively wiped out the competition.
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Having spent a couple of hours today battling Adobe to get my 2 grand software suite activated thanks to it not recognising my previous version serial or my existing install, I have concluded that I probably could have downloaded the lot from a torrent and had a version that worked straight off the bat.
Sometimes I don't know who these companies hate more, the customers or the pirates. As a customer and speaking after todays experience I genuinely wonder what the hell am paying for where there is probably a cracked and fully functional version online that doesn't require me to have a ponderous text chat conversation with a support droid in India every time I need to install my software to get them to unlock it.
I need a drink!
I'm glad it's not just me. Activating Adobe products in particular has the overall feel that I'm comitting some kind of offence by having the temerity to install the software my company just ponied up £1000 or more for. It doesn't seem to end there either - the damn stuff then seems to try and keep a permanent connection to their product validity server like it's going to turn from a legit copy to a pirated one somehow. Damn right it would be easier to steal the stuff.
It is easier. If you had just pirated it, it would have come with a crack that removed all activation in a easy to use installer.
These stupid big companies, in the attempt to kill piracy, punish the legit users to the point that it's easier to do the wrong thing than the right thing.
M$ product activation for example. You need to activate it but have no net access or the network is running and you can't configure it until it's registered. You ring M$ and talk to the robot who whines and says it's already activated and transfers you to an Indian who can't talk english. After much explaining slowly that your motherboard died and now windows needs to be reactivated, he finally gives you the code (maybe).
If you pirated it, the code was already filled out and the product activated.
Now if you look at France and it's three strikes rule, piracy has gone down. Now you'd expect legit sales to have increased wouldn't you? WRONG. Legit sales has also dropped. Clearly their thinking is completely wrong.
When the IP holder refuses to sell their product in your country, because they can't make a big enough mark up?
Is it really a "lost sale" at full retail price? if they don't ever sell in your country, and threaten importers with legal action if they buy a legit copy in a country that it is sold in, and then ship it to where the customer is willing to pay hard earned cash for the product?
The best way to reduce "copyright theft", get rid of the morons you call a board of directors (see Kodak, et al. for examples "top" business thinkers), and get your company run by people who understand modern retail business (i.e. Digital Distribution)
pretty basic but usable CAM software in my job of whipping industrial robots into line.
The package we use is £4000 per seat, other CAM packages I've seen range all the way upto £25 000 per seat.
Now if a factory 5 mins down the road from me offers 'robot programmer needed, £180/wk more than Boris is paid, but needs superwhizzyCAM' where do I get the the experience in using superwhizzyCAM in order to get a chance of an interview? pay £10 000 for a copy or pilfer a copy from the torrent indexing site that must not be mentioned?
Give us home users a decently priced version that may not have all the bells and whistles, and is crippled in saving/posting files , and when we arrive at work, we'll tell our bosses "Hey use superwhizzyCAM... it maybe £10 000 a seat, but is far far better than basiCAM'
How do you think office got so popular?
When I was a student I ran a whole host of illegally downloaded software. I was able to pick and choose my weapons with no second thought. Not even the cost of a student licence even if they had been available for some of the software.
Thing is I'm now I'm in the land of gainful employment I spend thousands of pounds on the very software I was happily pilfering 10 years back.
Being a freetard (of sort as I always paid for software I could afford) got me the experience of using the software, but also got me into a position where I was able to afford to buy it. It's rather unfortunate but that's how it happened.
It's time to start building lots more prisons for those who can't function within the laws of society. This is a good time to create permanent jobs and accelerate the economy as it's clear a small fraction of society just can't handle reality in the digital age. Iron bars will help them adjust. It's a win-win situation.
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or is it actually that out of date laws need to be adjusted to allow what has been deemed acceptable by society rather than used for unfair profiteering which was never there intented use?
...because all they do at the moment is stifle innovation. Not to mention the bully tactics and audits wasting immense amounts of fully legitimate SMEs time.
A person pirating, say MS office, may well have not been going to buy it, but I doubt that's much consolation for the FOSS projects who have lost a customer because someone thought they'd steal Office, rather than use Libre Office or the like.
Likewise if no-one used The GIMP, because everyone just stole Photoshop, would it exist? I very much doubt it.
If you don't care for big software companies, think of the little ones and the damage and lost customers they suffer because of people just taking what they want. Why would anyone contribute to a FOSS project's costs, if no-one used it?
if libreoffice/openoffice and gimp were any good they'd have right to complain, libreoffice may be an okay update from office 2003, but then when 2003 was out OpenOffice actually killed people it was so shit.
There was a time I thought it was good (the whole, free open source thing) then I realised it was just crap.
Gimp... oh man... gimp... gimp reminds me of the opening cut scene for "I have no mouth but I must scream" adventure game. HATE HATE HAAATE, if the word hate was written on every nano fiber of my millions of miles of circutry it would not describe how much I HATE GIMP.
I also used gimp for ageas. tsh
The most aptly named bit of software ever. I was using Deluxe Paint V on my Amiga 1200 the other day and that still remains a more usable package than Gimp. In fact, gasp, I found myself enjoying drawing on a computer again rather than it being a mundane daily task.
I often think the world might have been a happier place had EA persisted with DPaint. Certainly they could have given Photoshop a run for its money. Oh well.
Well if you don't like GIMP (and I'm not a fan of its UI, but then I came to it after becoming accustomed to various other ones) then use Gimpshop. Or Paint.NET. Or Inkscape. Or, I don't know, fucking look around for a bit and find something else.
As for Open/LibreOffice...from what I see, in at least 2/3 of cases it's effectively a drop-in replacement for what most people use MS Office for. Unless you actually use Sharepoint or need Outlook for Exchange-Flavoured Goodness, or you're using non-trivial macros in your spreadsheets, you're not as bound to MS Office as you'd think.
The point is, these alternatives are out there. Nobody said they'd be exactly what you want a $FUNCTION package to be, but at least you have a choice that allows you to spend £0 and get something that might do what you want/need to do.
Let's suppose next week some wizkid works out how to clone Ferraris using one of those Heath Robinson style open source Rapid Prototying machines. Before long you'd have some people nefariously creating Ferraris for themselves with plans they downloaded illegally off the internet. How many of those people would have been able to afford a real Ferrari? Not many.
Now let's transfer this fiction to the real world of computer software. How many folks who have a pirate copy of the the criminally over priced Adobe Software suite would have been able to afford it? Not bloody many! I know because as a responsible businessman I have to pay Adobe their extortionate fees.
These "lost billions" are pure fiction. Next time, ElReg, cast a critical, scathing eye upon such tosh. And if you must publish it, please include a truthful and preferably sarcastic assessment of the figures. Press outlets that publish these figures without questioning them are merely serving as an outlet for the lies.
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