Editorial: "How piracy changed my life"

"If you cannot make spending $99 dollars more appealing to your target audience than going to the pirate bay and messing around with sketchy-ass cracks, then frankly you just suck at selling software and really have little business doing it."

So..I should be forced to compete with someone making an exact copy of my software and giving it out for free? Does this make any sense to you?

Should hackernews.com be forced to compete with hackernews2.com, which is an exact duplicate?

"The people who pirate it are jobless students"

Do you have any evidence to back this up? Adobe has a student edition that can be purchased for almost nothing from many sites and it's all legitimate. Microsoft has these programs and also things like the bizspark/webspark programs. You can get free Microsoft software and all you need is an LLC (costs very little to create).

Your reasons don't really make sense anymore.

"with draconian DRM, or by not offering it on Steam, or whatever)"

Wow, we sure are in an entitlement generation. If you can't get exactly what you want, you take it upon yourself to just take it. I also can't really take anyone that uses the word "draconian" seriously.

The problem with your logic is that it never ends.

Look at the music industry: At first, it was because CDs were too expensive. The record companies responded by having 99 cent singles and very cheap music. Next, it was because the artists weren't being treated fairly. With the Internet, you can now release your music without any label.

Hell, even the infamous louis CK $5 comedy special was pirated like hell the day after it was released. It's very cheap, DRM free, and people still pirated the hell out of it. How do you explain this? The "Draconian" DRM? Too expensive? The bits weren't in the right order for the pirates' specification?

Piracy came first, not "Draconian DRM", so this is not a valid excuse as to why people are pirating, sorry.

"Gamers who are in the market for games buy games."

Your mindset isn't new and as a software developer (and business owner), I just need to change my business plan. Now, you will need to pay a monthly fee for my service instead of owning it outright. It stops piracy dead. I hope you enjoy paying a monthly fee for all of your software, because it's a world piracy helped create.

I'm sick of people like you that just can't be honest: you want free stuff and you aren't willing to use you hard earned money to get it.

That's a good comment. I am personally most amused at the amount of bureaucracy involved.

Copying for educational purposes is fair use. Are educational versions sold to make us think we cannot use software for free under fair use?

In case of learning to program though, I think the express edition is more than enough. Hell, I even know some company who are using the express edition for their main production tool.

I don't know of any good books on the subject. I have been studying the ideas since 1995 when I joined a startup called GolfWeb which was publishing a magazine about Golf on the Web. And the question came up "What is this worth?" and "Would people subscribe?" That lead to some interesting investigations into the how people value things. Then in the late 90's I was talking with a friend who was getting an MBA at Berkeley. We invented the 'time valued coke machine' over lunch one day, its a coke machine where you can buy a soda for 25 cents if you are willing to wait an hour to have it come out. For $2 it will come out right away. Now this is a really really precise soda machine (has an atomic clock in it) so if you paid your 25 cents your ticket tells you exactly when a soda will fall out of it. Now you can sell that to someone for 50 cents, and if you're getting near the hour mark you might be able to sell it for $1 or maybe $1.50. So you have just created, and sold information for a profit of 100 - 500%. All when you thought you were buying a soda :-).

I started writing my experiences with this up but stopped when I went to work for Google on the advice of my lawyer. Its a discouraging thing to write/talk about because without context people think its crazy, so slowly over time, as context develops, and "real world" examples get played out, the notion that information can have its own set of economic principles becomes less foreign because it sure as heck isn't behaving like it "should" if it was bound by the old rules.

Anyway, three ways I've seen so far to add value to information is that its timely, its rare, or its distilled. An example of timely information would be stock trades, very valuable right at the time they happen to high frequency traders, less and less as it gets older until its basically worthless 15 minutes old. Continuing with the stock market 'rare' or 'precious' information might be insider information about a company, it has value because it creates context that others can't see, which gives it a value proportional to the advantage it conveys, and lastly distilled value. Remember our stock market trades? Well they were very valuable 20 milliseconds after they happened, worthless after 15 minutes, but when kept over the course of time new data can be distilled from that old information (like maybe a stock always rises in the third quarter). I discovered at a conference that the intelligence agencies call this last one the 'Mosaic effect' where any single piece of information is useless but together they allow new data to emerge.

Artistic creation however is always the "best" information in terms of value. It can create value greatly out of proportion to the cost to produce it.

Anyway, like I said, I've been thinking about this stuff for 15 years. :-)