How damaging is piracy?

[cklink 0]

Yep - me too Bruce..I was done with them after the Airbus series. I owned everything they made up to then, and nothing after ...Every paywear addon will have its issues. It's how the company addresses them and there attitude toward thier customers that gets my money.I agree that piracy is not good as it impact's profit, but it's also been around as long at pc's have, even when I had my my TRS-80 LOL. Expect it, do your best at prevention with cost/loss evaluations - and build your business model to deal with it. To me it's its just another overhead liability, your not going to prevent it, and it will usually cost you more money and headaches to reduce it than your losing in net profit - so just do the best you can to minimise the expense.Save the money on complicated piracy prevention and put it into better customer service and or product, I'm sure you'll be farther ahead ... I have no problem having to enter/validate my serial number to be able to enter a forum for support, but put some crap like sony's or steam's brute force protection etc on - and you'll never see my coin - as I don't need the grief that usually goes with it ...Regards'Garett

[Guest zzmikezz]

Have you people no larger concern in life than that final $30 you spent with PSS? Read the press release. There is more to this story than piracy, and more to this story than the fact that your pet bugs weren't fixed.You have hearts of stone, and you have a lot of company in this and other threads. I am absolutely appalled.

[Jim Padgett 11]

>Thank you for mentioning the music Cd's-every time someone>copies one of those it is taking a small amount from a working>musicians retirement contribution-which is not all the great>to start with. Perhaps your widow friend would understand that>one!I have no sympothy or love for the record companys. They are Bold face thieves who hold the only source for a product that they charge prices for that can only be compared to the thieves in Washington.I can buy an album as a cassette tape for $ 6.00 and the same ablum costs $14.00 on a medium that is much cheaper to produce. They are blatant thieves who deservere to die. And if the cassette breaks their anser is to buy another one...Do you expect me to buy a CD for my home, another for my car and another for my portable CD player?I support anti piracy, but I could care less about the record industry.

[scoob 18]

>Do you expect me to buy a CD for my >home, another for my car and another >for my portable CD player?why would you buy a CD for you car, house, etc? you can carry the CD to a new location or remove it from the home stereo and put it in the protable.also -http://www.theinternetpatrol.com/riaa-says...s-have-it-wrongthe issue is distribution of copyrighted material

[W2DR 1,860]

I agree Bruce. PSS is gone because they never understood how to run a business. Like you, I haven't bought a PSS product in years. Any company who treats their customers as PSS has done over the years is doomed to fail - and good riddance. For PSS to say that piracy is the issue is just an example of denial personified.Doug

[Geofa 108]

The people who record the records for the record company are little guys like me-everytime you copy a cd I lose a few cents contribution to my pension which the big ugly record company contributes for every cd sold not to mention a small yearly residual check depending on if it sells well.Just like Microsoft-the big ugly record companies are made up of lots of smaller people trying to make a living.http://www.mediafire.com/imgbnc.php/1b5baf...b9f427f694g.jpgMy blog:http://geofageofa.spaces.live.com/

[Guest Rick Baldwin]

Yep. Piracy is wrong and there is no justifying it.But it is also wrong to release faulty products and treat your customers like dirt. If Mr. Waterfield wishes to hide his head in the sand and make piracy the scapegoat as the cause of his woes, then he might as well save himself the trouble of starting a 'new' PSS. It is doomed to fail.The only way for a company to survive is to provide quality products fairly priced with competent customer service. Then and only then can a company possibly expect to succeed. Piracy wasn't the cause of PSS's failure. If that were true, then NO add-on developers would survive. It was PSS's own practices and choices that killed them. Nothing more. Nothing less.-Rick----------- My System -----------P4 @ 2.53 GHz / 1GB RAM / NVIDIA GeForce 6800XT, 256MB / Windows XP Home

[mgh 89]

The answer we can't know exactly.However, it's unrealistic to assume that all pirates would never buy add-ons so that there would be no loss to the developrs. In reality there will be a loss in revenue but it's size is immaterial. Piracy is theft and pirates are thieves.

[Joe W 0]

I am a scenery designer of sorts. In partnership with others I worked on Ultimate Florida / FREEflow, Bahamas / FREEflow, Carribbean/ FREEflow, and a great many other sceneries that were freeware. About 4 years ago I did a number of towns in Alaska using Landclass. I believe there were 43 in all and it was uploaded to both Avsim and Flightsim. A gentleman that has a "Freeware" site that charges to have access to it, placed for sale, $10, 43 Alaskan Cities that were the exact same cities that I did for free. I think it's a bit out to think that 2 people choose the same 43 Alaskan Cities to do the landclass for.This is piracy. I did the work and he sold it and I never got a penny. This same gentleman thinks I'm off base to restrict my sceneries from his site and has threatened me with a lawsuit. You pass judgement on this one. Joe W.

[Steve Halpern 176]

I think a fair way to look at it is like this.Lets assume that there is a Product X that sells for $30.00 USD...1. It sells 200 units over 3 months, for $6000.00 in total revenue.2. During this period, 100 copies are pirated.3. Lets estimate that 60% of this group would never purchase (kids, people without the money, or people who enjoy being a pirate).4. To be even more fair, lets say that 10 of these convert and purchase the fully licensed version.5. That leaves 30 lost sales for the vendor, or $600.00 USD. Translated, that is a 10% loss.Now, lets add these other factors...The vendor runs a small but nice web site. On this, maybe he has to pay for some extra bandwidth from the pirate activity... updates, etc. But not a huge deal, but it is measurable.Next, he and his partner do support. Some from the pirate group ask for support, and this takes time. Again, not huge, but measurable.Finally, a human factor. The vendor worked very hard in the evenings after work, and did enjoy the development process. Yes, he did miss some time with his family, but they were tolerant of his hobby, and he knew he would make it up to them. In fact, he plans to use funds for some hardware upgrades and a better family holiday. Or, maybe the vendor simply did it all out of passion, and as a way to get some additional revenue, or in some cases, full time revenue. But at the heart of this was a sincere effort in development.Now, he sees his work pirated. He sees the work tossed around with full disregrard... with the people doing it having zero respect for the violation, or in some cases, enjoying the taunting that sometimes comes with the territory. He is now angry, feels terribly violated, and in some cases helpless to do anything about it.This human factor greatly amplifies any of the concrete calculations in the first part. It leads to deflation of the development spirit... and lets hope he can put it enough aside so he can find the value to continue.So in many cases he can overcome the affects, but in some cases, the $600 lost revenue and the other measureable factors, mixed with the human factor, does have an affect that puts him over the top, and causes the vendor to withdraw somewhat, or completely. In another small way, in his mind, stopping the work is one way to not let the pirates to get the work... kind of an odd satisfaction, but and unfortunate side effect that does maybe factor in sometimes.So, the above is a way to look at it all.Also, piracy is still new in terms of the overall new industry of digital content. Laws have yet to be made to fully encompass this new economy. In time, as things adjust, and the legal system starts to have an influence on the situation, then there will be an overall better balance to the situation. The gates to the playground are open now with little consequences to what happens on the inside. But my guess is that this will change over time as much more content comes to us from the digital landscape.Until then, we can only hope that the integrety of the digital world as a whole can inch upwards.

[Gavin 99]

> There is more to>this story than piracy, and more to this story than the fact>that your pet bugs weren't fixed.>You seem to have access to information that we don't. Would you care to share that or is it secret? If no, no problems. I've never owned a PSS product but belive they were once very popular.

[Guest Zevious Zoquis]

This is an interesting discussion. Personally, I see the issue from both sides. I have no doubt that piracy has an impact on the bottomline for software vendors, but otoh I don't believe it has nearly the impact the vendors (or the music industry) themselves would have us believe. I think Steve Halpern has it about right but I'd put the percentage of pirates who wouldn't have bought either way at more like 80-90%. I just think the vast majority of stuff that gets downloaded is downloaded simply becuase "it's there." I'd wager a fair portion never even gets used, and if it does get used it's quickly deleted becuase it doesn't work properly. It just seems to me that anyone who's into FS enough to know about and want to install and fly complex addons isn't going to be very satisfied with buggy cracked copies. Sure, you can find stuff that works properly but theres a lot of trash to wade through and often the installation process itself is pretty involved (and yes, I'm honest enough to admit that I have some experience in this regard - though not with FS stuff). Somebody earlier drew an anology between software piracy and common shoplifting. I don't want to sound like I'm defending piracy, but I think theres a fundamental difference between the two. If I walk into a shop, shove a boxed game under my jacket and walk out, I've not only acquired the game for free for myself, but I've physically removed the potential for that shop owner to sell that game to somebody else. Theres an undeniable loss of $ there. That's not the case with data theft. It's obviously theft to steal a Ferrari off the showroom floor, but what if I had a magic camera with which I could snap a picture of that Ferrari parked in the dealership and then switch the camera to "reverse" at home and have it spit out a perfect reproduction of the car on my driveway. Did I steal a Ferrari? I mean the car is still sitting at the dealership for the dealer to sell and there was no way on earth I was ever going to BUY one myself - not on my income, lol. I definitely got one for free, but isn't a large part of the definition of "theft" the loss of income incurred by the victim of that theft? Now if I'd been on my way into the dealership with $175,000 in my pocket and some shady character had handed me the magic camera on my way in, well then that would change things wouldn't it?While it may be (probably is really) morally wrong to download a cracked copy of a piece of software, doing so doesn't physically make it impossible for the vendor to sell that product to somebody else. They've only lost $ if there was actually any chance that the pirate might have purchased the product had he not been able to d/l it for free. Thats the crux of the issue really. Theres no doubt that vendors would be better off if piracy didn't exist - the question is just how much better off and the answer remains unproven afaic. In many cases it seems that "piracy" becomes the catch-all explanation for every sales decline that occurs. You never hear the music industry say "well, our total sales dropped by 25% last year. We attribute this to several factors - not the least of which is the overall decline in the quality of the product we put out. Man I can't believe some of the dreck we released this year. It's no surprise people chose not to listen in droves."Anyway, hope I haven't gotten myself into any trouble here. Just trying to be honest. In closing I'd just like to point out that I spent upwards of $500 on FS9 payware stuff over the years and most if not all of it was well worth it. :)

[Geofa 108]

I think Steve explained the software side-I'll take a crack at the music side: "I don't believe it has nearly the impact the vendors (or the music industry) themselves would have us believe."Here is a recording -if you scroll down you will see my name listed among many musicians who created this recording:http://cgi.ebay.com/MINT-CD-The-Four-4-Top....c49.m136.l1275When a recording like this is made-the musician is paid union scale-which for this recording at the time was about $300.00 US. "Wow-that is all you get paid for making something like this?"- might be your initial response....Well no-because by union rules-every time that recording is sold the record company has to contribute a fee to your union pension and a fee to a residual payment which occurs as long as the recording is being sold. This fee is extremely small-but of course depends on how many recordings are sold. Make a big seller-you might see something (like a $50 residual at the end of the year and $50 pension contribution)-make a loser and you get essentially nothing. Even when successful the amounts are not great-but they are something, and part of the way you make your living-and if you make lots of recordings this is one source of income to a hard working musician.Of course if instead of paying $9.99 for this recording-Aunt May burns a copy of it and gives it to a friend-and that friend likes it and makes another copy for another friend etc.-we musicians get nothing.So in effect-when making a copy you are stealing from our pockets in addition to the major artists who also are losing their percentage and the record companies. It isn't about just ripping off some big corporation/artist that has piles of money to freely lose-which can't be justified either.http://www.mediafire.com/imgbnc.php/1b5baf...b9f427f694g.jpgMy blog:http://geofageofa.spaces.live.com/

[Steve Halpern 176]

The only thing wrong with your Ferrari analogy is that if the "magic camera" prevented 10% of the people from purchasing the Ferarri that would have otherwise purchased it, or even 1% of the people, then it still is an action that is causing a material loss no matter how you look at it.Stealing is wrong... in any culture or society as far as I know. And even though it may not appear that you are stealing in a bricks and mortar sense, you really are. Because if your actions are part of a group that takes revenue away from normal businesses, and it is an action that is not through fair competition (and is an action that is considered illegal in most places), then it is bricks and mortar theft.If a group of 100 people met, and said "Lets steal this bag of peanuts from the store...", and then they elect "Joe" from their group to go steal the actual bag and bring it back, then they are all theives in a sense because they are all sharing the bag that was stolen. And even if you do not eat or take a peanut, but decide to be part of the group, then you are participating as part of the theft machine.So beyond any moral argument, we all just have to do the best we can, and hope honest people stay honest (and maybe dishonest people see the light), and that any company that tries to serve their customers well will hopefully be able to have a marketplace to keep doing that.

[Guest Zevious Zoquis]

Once again Geofa, the point is that you as a musician have only lost money if theres a chance Aunt May and her friends might have actually purchased the recording had they not acquired it free. My contention was simply that the "industry" tends to exxagerate the amount they are losing to piracy - not that they aren't losing anything to piracy.