Software Piracy: is the Battle Lost?

How far should you go to fight piracy? Is it even worth the effort? Just how much damage does piracy do?

by Heather Laine

A discussion on the use-livecode email list got me thinking about this hoary old topic again. Software piracy. Where are we at with it these days?  It’s an emotive topic that evokes anything from exhausted apathy to outright fury in a software developer.

Why is this such a huge problem?  What is it that allows normally honest, well-meaning people who would not dream of, say, stealing a sweater from a supermarket, or who would have no difficulty at least in understanding that stealing a sweater is theft, regard anything composed of bytes as rightfully theirs?  I guess its to do with tangibility.  Software is not a physical object, and humans seem to need to have something to actually hold in their hands before they regard it as “real”.  If it’s just pixels on a screen, how can it really have a cost associated?  All they have done is press a button, and the “object” they have downloaded still remains available online, for the next person to download, so how can they be stealing?

Then there are all those people who mean to pay.  Sometime.  Eventually.  When they get round to it and the price of bread is cheaper and … hey, wait, why did that software I’ve been using free for years suddenly flake out on me?? What do you mean, I never paid for it?

Of course, we, as developers, know that those pixels on a screen represent weeks, months, even years of work, during which time we have bills to pay, mouths to feed, and in a very real way software piracy is damaging our livelihoods.  Everytime a normally honest person downloads and uses our software without paying they are stealing from our paypackets.  I’ve had many conversations with people who say things like “oh, but look at the price of software!  Microsoft are making so much money its obscene, why should I pay for it?  Developers should sell their software cheaper, then we wouldn’t have to pirate it!”  Well, that may be true of Microsoft, but its certainly not true of Joe Developer, just trying to make enough from his or her efforts to get by. And just as in the insurance industry, if everybody paid for it, the prices would come down dramatically.  All those good folks out there who do cough up for software are paying for the silent underbelly who are not.

Which brings me to the numbers.  Exactly how big a problem is piracy? Well, according to the 2011 BSA Global Software Piracy Study, piracy stands at 42% globally and rising, representing $63 billion in lost sales to the software industry.  If one makes some sweeping assumptions about what is being pirated and by whom, on average that could translate into software being almost 50% cheaper, if everyone paid for what they use.  Or, looking at it another way, you could be earning almost twice as much, and ploughing money back into new products and more innovation.

So what can we do?  It’s a truism that a determined enough hacker is going to pirate your software, whatever protection you put on it.  In some cases, the more intricate your protection, the more satisfaction a cracker will get out of pirating it.  This doesn’t mean we should throw up our hands in despair however.  There are things that can be done, to keep the honest people honest.  Granny Smith or Mrs Bloggs are not going to go to great lengths to circumvent your trial system, or break your keycodes.  You can even, if you are smart, turn casual piracy to your advantage.  If your software is good, and people love using it, then a free copy can eventually turn into a sale, maybe with an upgrade, or some kind of trace system where you can identify illegally used copies and contact the users. By and large however, for individual developers, spending their energy on combating piracy is counterproductive.  Our time is generally better spent on making the software worth paying for and marketing it so that its easier to find the paid versions than the free ones.  We just can’t afford to spend our time chasing rainbows.

Ultimately, the solution has to be a change in attitude and perceptions.  Public sympathy tends to be with the “Robin Hood” guys who are “stealing from the rich and giving to the poor”.  A story about the poor developer guy pushed out of business by the big, rich, software pirates… well, I haven’t seen one lately.  Have you?