I'll tell my employees that as our company folds from lack of revenue. I'll tell my wife that as we apply for food stamps. I'll tell the that to the next person interviewing me for a job because people didn't want to pay for the value I provided.
Well, that simply sounds like a failed product, no? Not everything is successful. Given finite resources (human labor in this case) not everything can be successful.
Just because some people would take it for free does not mean they would take it at the cost it takes to make the product profitable.
It's the same with music piracy. Sure, one might buy 1 CD. Even 10 CDs. But very few people would buy those 20GB+ of worth of music they hoard on their harddrives. It's something they take for free but would never pay for.
The difference with music is that you can make a partial purchase because the product is sliced into small enough pieces. I may have the whole discography of a band spanning decades, but I only buy one or two of their albums. At least they still get some money that way, so maybe they don't have to feel the same frustration that you do.
In that sense piracy enables some sort of involuntary "set your own price" scheme. But that only works if the product can be sliced down into small enough units enabling the consumers to set their own price.
For software this is more difficult, but not impossible. For example adobe products or microsoft office get pirated in private environments but paid for in commercial settings. The private copies serve to entrench the product in the market, even if they don't generate a direct profit by themselves. So even there is a difference between what people are willing to pay and the retail price of the products.
This is really splitting hairs. Yes, I acknowledge that it wasn't _just_ piracy that caused the company to shut its doors. But to say that I can't be frustrated about people using the results of my work for free? In what other industry is it acceptable to say, "Yes, we like your product, but no, we're not going to pay, and if you try to make us pay we're going to throw our toys out of the pram about how evil the software developers are!" That's taking it to a whole new level, and that's really the point I was responding to.
This is about movies and music at large. Software piracy is a solved problem. In games, the majority of people now use Steam and nobody really cares about the few that look for it on random torrent websites or some such because: 1. They are a much more likely source of malware (you don't just play files, you run executables). 2. Games that care have adopted an online-only DRM model (which has its own problems but that's a story for another thread) 3. A lot of games have an audience comprised entirely of non-paying customers (children without credit cards). Parents are not expected to pirate, and if kids do then no harm done.
In office software, Photoshop and MS Office are the two big names in piracy and both MS and Adobe silently encourage piracy on their products to enforce lock in. And while that sounds scummy when I put it like that, it is an excellent demonstration of what I was mentioning earlier: You have eyeballs/ears which you can easily turn into wallets.
So please, give me a break, your company did not go under because of piracy. And Hollywood/the RIAA have more digits in their bank accounts than total employees.
That may be, but that doesn't mean that people have the right to unilaterally decide that the price should be zero against the wishes of the seller. They may have the technical ability to do so, but that does not make it moral or ethical to do so in the most general case. I'd like to have a lower electrical bill. Electricity is a non-tangible good, like bits. Does that mean that I should be able to tell the electric company to shove off just because I think they charge too much for electricity? Why is that any different?
If my software fails because nobody wants it at the price it's at then that's a signal that I should lower prices. If my software fails because a large group decides to void the social contract and get my software for free because they disagree with their pricing then I have every right to get angry about it. The software I produce took time and money to produce. It's okay if you don't want to pay for it. Then don't use it. You don't get to have all of the benefit for none of the cost. That's the part that's the most infuriating.
>Software piracy is a solved problem.
How do you make that logical jump?
>You have eyeballs/ears which you can easily turn into wallets.
Not if people are used to and can continue to get the software for free. That relies upon the generosity of some other person down the line to actually pay for the software. Some companies may choose to make that decision. Good for them! But the assumption that all companies will or must or otherwise be ethically or morally bankrupt is a bad one. I'd love to spend all of my time building software for others and let them pay what they want for it, but I have to eat and have a family to support.
Software piracy doesn't hurt big shops or new developers as much as it hurts the smaller guys. Big shops price it into their software costs, and as you said, industry standard software (Office, Photoshop) rely upon it to bring in new users because their target market is saturated. New developers are just happy to get their name out there in many cases - it's a cost of doing business that they can afford.
The small shops in the middle get it the worst. Not enough name recognition to be an industry leader yet enough people that feel entitled to their software for free. The vast majority of them can't win and fold. Is that what meritocracy is? Subject to the whims of an entitled core of freeloaders?
Good thing I said "let's forget that", huh?
> How do you make that logical jump?
Please keep reading?
> The small shops in the middle get it the worst.
Those small shops you keep mentioning, they don't exist anymore. There was a very small decade during which they did exist... shareware shops. Those were really crap. Boy I'm glad they're gone. You know what replaced them? Web apps shops (online-only, no piracy there) and mobile apps shops (where piracy has a much, much higher barrier of entry and is comparatively non-existant).
So as I said, software piracy is more or less a solved problem.
Well thank goodness you're here to solve all the world's ills! Believe it or not, there are still significant numbers of people that either aren't connected or use software in a situation where they're not connected to the net. That totally screws the usefulness of webapps.