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Originally Posted by Brutha  If I buy an apple and plant the seed in my garden to grow a apple tree, and eat the apples from that apple tree that would also be the same as stealing apples from a grocery store right?
Stealing phyical items is just something different then duplicating them and giving away those dupicates. |
To make a tree out of an apple requires quite a bit of work. You don't just put it into the ground and WHAM! you've got a tree. If it were that simple, nobody would ever buy apples -- people would just grow them in their backyard. That's why your analogy doesn't work. Growing apple trees from a seed is equivalent to writing a competing copy (even a clone) of a certain software using the same tools (programming language and compiler) as the person who wrote the original software. That's what's required to go from a seed to a tree. By planting your own trees you're entering the market legitimately and you have to compete with existing apple growers. Duplicating software would be like taking apples from another person's tree. Sure, they still have the tree but you're stealing some of their apples. Not a perfect analogy either but it works better I think.
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Originally Posted by Brutha You can either say that pirating a product is helping a company or you can say it is damaging.
Saying both at the same time is just silly. |
I was talking about Microsoft primarily, which is really a unique case when it comes to piracy. Microsoft unlike most software companies has always had three major channels of distribution: OEM (PC makers), businesses (volume licensing), and retail (home users). I would imagine that 99.9% of the piracy occurred in the home user market (OEMs obviously don't pirate, and very few businesses do as well). Most of Microsoft's revenue comes from OEM sales I believe, followed by business licenses and then a little bit of retail sales. So in their case having lots of piracy at retail level didn't hurt them that much and only reinforced their monopoly in the long term.
However, despite this they're finally starting to crack down on piracy. They probably feel that they've reached max home user market saturation and it's time to use their monopoly power to force people to pay up. That's why Windows XP had online activation, and why the MS web site is starting to only allow updates to "genuine" verified copies of Windows. Piracy didn't create the MS monopoly (the OEMs did it for them) but it certainly helped strengthen it. If people use it at home they're likely to use it at work (where a legit copy would be used) and it becomes a vicious two way cycle. But this only works if your software is necessary for both home and business use, and if you've established yourself as a de facto monopoly through crooked OEM deals.
