Piracy 101

With sites like pirate bay, Bit-Comet and others receiving a lot of attention piracy is becoming a large problem. People day after day are pirating, I assume this is because they are unaware of what its doing to industries. The film industry, music industry, software industry and others have taken a huge hit by piracy.

People don’t realize how badly industries are getting effected by piracy. For example out of all the computers that have the application Adobe Photoshop installed 90% of them have pirated copies. Another fact to know is that according to Alexa (a website which ranks other sites through traffic, trackbacks, time on the pages, etc) piratebay.org is ranked as the number 52 most visited sites in the United States (ranked even higher in many other countries).

Although piracy is wrong I do understand why some might do it. Many applications are incredibly expensive for example Final Cut Pro, applications like that one cost over $1500. Now most people only use applications like that once a year so it doesn’t really make sense paying thousands of dollars for an application you’ll use once a year. Another reason why people resort to piracy (in my eyes I don’t really see it as piracy since I do this) is for testing the purchase it unless I use it first. This is exactly why I’m not a big fan of purchasing applications on the iPhone there is no trial system to test apps before purchase. After pirating the app if I don’t like it I’ll uninstall the applications and never use it again. If the application is good and I can see myself using it every day then I’ll support the developer by paying for the application.

The main problem is solving the piracy problem. Many people can’t come up with a solution and I’ll tell you what this is. For programs you need to do the following: One you need to offer a trial program for the full software showing them what’s to offer because if your application is actually any good the user wil probably support you. Second don’t only offer one full application that costs a lot. You need to offer two applications so that users have a choice, one a full version for the experts (with all features) and second a rendered down version for the average user. Not everyone needs the full package (and from experience I know that if there is a cheaper version most will pay for the more expensive one since people always have a superiority complex). Now you might be thinking, people might still pirate well you need to do what Windows or Wirecast does with product keys. Don’t use an algorithm like most developers do. You need to set it so that you manually pick and activate their key and register to it a server and make sure the license and require the user to register the application online (also obviously make sure that it’s licensed PER COMPUTER). Now if you have smaller application where you cant do things like this then you need to offer both a free download and a paid version, just add advertisements to the free version so that you can generate the amount of revenue that you lose from people not purchasing the application (more people will buy it any way because everyone finds advertisements annoying). If you have any suggestions or any points to add on please write them in the comment section below 🙂