11–20 of 242 posts
(No victim-blaming or other moral subtext intended. Just curious.)
From day one my gut has always told me that Android users are pretty much like Amiga users were back in the day -- the idea of paying for software (any software!) seems like a bad idea. That may be good news if you're Google or a carrier, but it's bad news if you're a developer. To me fair if Android is part of the "Google way" and maybe the solution is to have advertising bring in revenue (which goes back to AdSense…
Is this one of the reasons games are all going free+in-app downloads? What's the actual state of mobile app piracy today? It seems like many mobile developers are already moving to alternative models not involving direct sales, whether that's a subscription, virtual goods, or pay-for-addons/upgrades.
I must be missing something really obvious here. I haven't used Earbits, but as a streaming service, why not enforce things like this server-side, rather than trying to suppress pirates from distributing the cracked client app? (No victim-blaming or other moral subtext intended. Just curious.)
I didn't recognize it as an allegory until halfway through, because jailbroken iPhones already have a very comprehensive free-cracked-app store, and I can only assume Android users have way more options. Is this one of the reasons games are all going free+in-app downloads? What's the actual state of mobile app piracy today? It seems like many mobile developers are already moving to alternative models not involving di…
About the only thing that I can think that will defend against this is a streaming/always online service that actively requires cooperation from a server as part of its implementation. Any offline licensing system can and most likely will be cracked eventually, until you end up with the equivalent of CD-keys and server-side detection of duplicates or invalid ones. Even then, if you're only using the remote end for license validation, that code can just be removed - the most viable models are either streaming content (in a way that can't be batched and rehosted/provided locally), or offering compelling multi-player / shared online features that require a valid auth token.
Maybe app developers should now form a group like MPAA?
And they solicit informants to report piracy (with lucrative rewards).
> They tell you your business model is broken. You should make money some other way. Maybe you should sell t-shirts with your company’s name on them, or put on events of some kind and charge for tickets. That’s where the real money is. Paid apps are a thing of the past, they say.
I can't help but think, Yeah, I actually do think that. Like it or not, distribution of quality media was a big part of the value provided by the music industry before the digital age and the internet. I'm not making an argument for or against the ethics of the piracy itself, but I think music producers (both big studios and "little guys") are unwise to rely on legislation and lawsuits to protect their business.
Ultimately, piracy breaks down to "people want your stuff, but you've priced it too highly". In the case of apps, that's all it is. In the case of music, it's a little different. Music is cheap, but it's rare that you can get it in a good format: everything is lossy, and for people with good audio kit and good hearing, that makes the music unusable. Therefore, people that both Want It Now and want full quality are going to download the FLAC torrent rather than buy lossy MP3s. (They won't buy the CD because it takes too long for the mailman to deliver it.)
The same goes for movies and TV. Nobody will sell you those things without DRM, so if you use Linux exclusively, you have no option but to pirate the content. Make every TV show a standard non-DRM'd HTTP download for a buck, and piracy (among people with money) evaporates instantly. But the content producers want a bogeyman to blame for all their problems, so they intentionally keep piracy alive.
(If there were no such thing as the ability to pirate movies, people still wouldn't have bought the 88th redo of Star Wars. We liked it the first time. But it's easier for Lucas to blame the evil greedy pirates than his evil greedy self.)