1 hour ago, FlyingBubbles said:

 

Interesting point-of-view...

Edited July 22, 20205 yr by charliearon
Removed quoted remark

1 hour ago, FlyingBubbles said:

 

Award for the dumbest thing ever written on AVSIM.

Edited July 22, 20205 yr by charliearon
removed quoted remark

9 minutes ago, jabloomf1230 said:

Award for the dumbest thing ever written on AVSIM.

Most stupid and contravening to Avsim rules.

» Piracy, Key Sharing, Link Sharing, EULA Busting, etc.: Any message, post or topic heading that appears to advocate or perpetuates piracy, shares cracked software, links to or other like material, advocates avoidance of or contravening of End User License Agreements (EULAs) or can be interpreted as approval of piracy or EULA "busting", will be immediately removed and the poster banned. Piracy of software destroys the basis of our hobby and AVSIM enforces anti-piracy policies strictly. If you are a pirate, advocate piracy, or use pirated material, do not register. We place EULA busting in the same category.

2 minutes ago, Dominique_K said:

Most stupid and contravening to Avsim rules.

Absolutely - his post reported.

FlyingBubbles has decided to leave.

The username checks out.

I'd like to ask again, does anyone know if MSFS will support the add-on.xlm method or something similar?  There is likely to be a number of updates to the sim and it would be nice not to have to reinstall addons.

Thx,

Al

No. One. Knows. Yet.

There are reasons why piracy is 'tolerated' in a sense. A company loses revenue because of piracy but tracking pirates down can be expensive too. What will they get from a 14 year old playing a pirate copy of their product other than bad press about a corporation picking on a kid? Even if you can tie it down to a household/computer who is the culprit? 4 people in the house, who are you going to sue? What can you expect to gain from someone who downloaded a pirate game from the net but hasn't shared it with others and therefore its cost the company a single product fee?

Piracy is an accepted part of software development. You cant stop it. All you can really do is try to come up with the right level of DRM that does not inconvenience paying customers too much.

 

21 hours ago, sanh said:

Piracy is an accepted part of software development. You cant stop it. All you can really do is try to come up with the right level of DRM that does not inconvenience paying customers too much.

Shoplifting is also a dark part of the retail activity and as such  its cost is included in the margin but as we do not tolerate store shoplifting, there no reason to tolerate software piracy and its advocacy. 

Also do not underestimate that large scale software piracy is an activity of criminal networks and not  only of the proverbial 14 yo kids and their lousy parents. Another reason not to show one ounce of mercy for it and to those who present it as something as a normal commercial activity. 

Edited July 23, 20205 yr by n4gix
Removed unnecessary long quote!

I don't think anyone here is advocating for piracy. Some people are saying it's "normal" as in the sense you can't expect not to happen. Same reason I have to carry a bike lock when parking my bicycle somewhere in the city. I know without a bike lock it will be stolen 15 minutes later. Sadly it's the "normal" in the society we live in, if I don't use a bike lock and my bike gets stolen, people will blame me for not using a bike lock, not the thief 

3 hours ago, cepact said:

Sadly it's the "normal

Yes, it's always the many that pay for the few, is that known as the eases way out?   

2 hours ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

As far as effort to bring criminal(s) to justice depends on many factors, frequency, country of origin, international agreements in place between countries (if data trail leads outside of country of origin) ... times have change (we have BSA and other legal means) and the myth about convictions never happening is just that ... a myth. 

...

So the pretense that one can't fight piracy is completely false and not reflective of reality.

Rob, is there any evidence that the kind of exemplary punishment you're talking about moves the needle at all as far as actually reducing piracy goes? Seems to me the fact that (as you noted) there's a near-universal impression no one is ever actually prosecuted would also limit any deterrent effect.

James

On the flip side, Austin Meyer got hit with a lawsuit by a patent troll for simply using the Google-provided DRM system on the Android Marketplace (Google Play Store) for one of his apps. It cost him a lot in time and $$ to fight it.

Edited July 23, 20205 yr by JRBarrett

36 minutes ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

Not sure why you'd ask that question or why it would matter?  Like I indicated earlier, we recover (convert to paying customers) about 25% of those we ID as stealing software (enough to allow the company to grow provide jobs).  But as far as reducing software theft per "capita", yes it has declined, most significantly in North America and Europe. 

https://epicenter.wcfia.harvard.edu/blog/change-winds-software-piracy

One of many sources, but from first hand experience I can positively say there has/is a reduction in theft.

Cheers, Rob.

Why does it matter? If your goal is to reduce piracy, I'd say it matters whether a given approach actually works!

The research you linked to is interesting, because it suggests that one of the most important factors driving the decline in piracy in developed markets is the increasing availability of relatively cheap and user-friendly streaming services like Netflix and Hulu. That's not a particularly shocking revelation, but it has implications for software vendors. In particular, that insight suggests they'd be best served by avoiding draconian measures (including but not limited to cumbersome DRM) that make the experience worse, instead of better, for the paying customer.

Earlier in the thread someone mentioned an addon producer that rejected using the addon.xml method because it supposedly makes piracy easier. That's the kind of dumb approach that doesn't work that I'm talking about.

The research you linked to doesn't mention more aggressive enforcement as a factor in declining piracy rates in developed countries. If we're talking about first-hand experience, what I've observed is that the decline in game piracy has gone hand-in-hand with increasingly frictionless online distribution (much the way that pirated, but not legitimate, games were distributed 20 years ago) and more frequent aggressive sales by platforms like Steam. I don't know for sure that those factors have directly caused the decline, either, but I think it's a possibility worth considering.

James