How honest are people when they think nobody's looking?
The Internet is a fine place to find out: The near-frictionless ease of sharing files online means that if you want to download something without paying, nobody's going to stop you.
This can be bad for record labels or movie studios (though not necessarily individual artists). But in the shareware industry, which can't function without Internet distribution, this freedom of theft can be much worse.
Shareware is try-before-you-buy software, distributed directly from developers' Web sites and usually sold for much less than comparable software in stores. This often makes it a wonderful deal for consumers.
But for shareware to survive, consumers have to pay for it. Do they?
Most shareware authors can only guess. But Ambrosia Software, a developer of Macintosh games and utilities in Rochester, N.Y., could stop guessing after it revised its payment system last year.
The new system aims to stop people from using pirated registration codes in two ways.
First, after a user buys a program, Ambrosia e-mails him or her a personalized registration code stamped with the date of purchase. Entering this code into the program activates it and ends any trial-period limits -- but the software won't accept a code older than 30 days. (Once the code checks out, Ambrosia programmer Matt Slot said, the program won't run any further tests.)
Second, although customers may renew an expired code online, they may do so only by providing the original purchaser's name. Ambrosia also keeps a blacklist of registration codes and user names that it's seen posted online, as well as codes renewed under odd circumstances -- for example, Slot said, those ''renewed from five different countries in a single day.''
These measures don't make piracy impossible, but they can slow the rate of it -- especially ''casual piracy,'' the kind perpetrated by people who don't want to work at theft.
So, how many people tried to use a pirated registration code, anyway? In two typical days at the end of January, more than half of the users attempting to renew registrations for one Ambrosia utility tried a stolen code -- 104 out of 197.
News source: SiliconValley.com
View: The Full Story
The Internet is a fine place to find out: The near-frictionless ease of sharing files online means that if you want to download something without paying, nobody's going to stop you.
This can be bad for record labels or movie studios (though not necessarily individual artists). But in the shareware industry, which can't function without Internet distribution, this freedom of theft can be much worse.
Shareware is try-before-you-buy software, distributed directly from developers' Web sites and usually sold for much less than comparable software in stores. This often makes it a wonderful deal for consumers.
But for shareware to survive, consumers have to pay for it. Do they?
Most shareware authors can only guess. But Ambrosia Software, a developer of Macintosh games and utilities in Rochester, N.Y., could stop guessing after it revised its payment system last year.
The new system aims to stop people from using pirated registration codes in two ways.
First, after a user buys a program, Ambrosia e-mails him or her a personalized registration code stamped with the date of purchase. Entering this code into the program activates it and ends any trial-period limits -- but the software won't accept a code older than 30 days. (Once the code checks out, Ambrosia programmer Matt Slot said, the program won't run any further tests.)
Second, although customers may renew an expired code online, they may do so only by providing the original purchaser's name. Ambrosia also keeps a blacklist of registration codes and user names that it's seen posted online, as well as codes renewed under odd circumstances -- for example, Slot said, those ''renewed from five different countries in a single day.''
These measures don't make piracy impossible, but they can slow the rate of it -- especially ''casual piracy,'' the kind perpetrated by people who don't want to work at theft.
So, how many people tried to use a pirated registration code, anyway? In two typical days at the end of January, more than half of the users attempting to renew registrations for one Ambrosia utility tried a stolen code -- 104 out of 197.
News source: SiliconValley.com View: The Full Story
Slot wrote about this in the company's newsletter ( http://www.ambrosiasw.com/news/newsletter ), then invited users to comment.
Their replies were breathtaking, both in volume (eight very long pages' worth) and in their straightforward defenses of software theft.
Most of these arguments fell into a few categories:
- I can't afford to pay at all.
- The program isn't worth any money in the first place.
- I don't need this program enough to buy it, so my occasional use of it doesn't equate to a lost sale.
- The very concept of calling a collection of bits ''property'' is meaningless; ergo, no theft took place.
Summarized Ambrosia Chief Executive Andrew Welch in an e-mail: ''Many of these people who are ripping off software don't see it as stealing, and they jump through some fairly impressive hoops to rationalize it all.''
These excuses are complete hooey. In other cases of file sharing, the ethics do get blurry, to the point where piracy can be seen as the market's logical response to a broken distribution system. But using shareware without paying is about as naked a case of theft as you can find.
The try-before-you-buy argument for grabbing songs off file-sharing services doesn't fly here; with shareware, that free trial is part of the deal.
Nor is there an analogy to downloading the one song you like on an album instead of paying for $18 worth of filler on the CD. Most shareware programs are small applications that perform just one function and are priced appropriately, sometimes $10 or less.
The victims here aren't faceless corporate conglomerates, but small businesses or individuals writing code in their spare time -- many of whom answer their users' e-mail a lot quicker than any commercial software publisher.
None of these folks are getting rich off their labor. A popular shareware program will draw thousands of downloads -- at a considerable cost in bandwidth -- but far fewer registrations, depending on how the developer nags users to pay up.
''If you make your program just have a 'nag' screen, you can expect about 0.25 percent of people who try it to register it,'' wrote Brad Wardell, product manager for the Livonia, Mich., developer Stardock. ''If you make it a time-limited demo, you will typically get this up to 0.5 percent of people. If you limit the features, you can typically get around 1 percent.''
Finally, shareware fees go almost directly to the developer. There are no agents in the supply chain to siphon off the profits, nor is there a Shareware Industry Association of America to spend membership dues on lobbying efforts.
So if you use shareware, pay for it. If you can't even do that, you have no business complaining about how record labels and movie studios are afraid to sell their content online.
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