🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <kYMDBwy00UgXIAx_FN@andrew.cmu.edu> wb1j+@andrew.cmu.edu (William M. Bumgarner) writes:
>> software publishers loose significant portion of sales due to piracy
>I would have to disagree with this; I know of far more people who will simply
>refuse to buy a package that is copy protected-- no matter how high of quality
>it is.

	This is all fine and good, but the fact remains that it is
	the publisher's decision whether or not to copy protect,
	and this decision is based on what they think is right for
	them.  And, btw, they have much better intelligence about
	the market and piracy than you do.

>There is NO reason to copy protect software; it costs the company sales,
>annoys the users that try to put up with it, and disrupts normal computer
>usage.  It, in no way, prevents piracy-- from the experience of knowing the
>Apple II piracy world in its prime (remember the AE-Pro lines?), it was often
>the case to try and spread copy-protected software as much as possible while
>the non-copy-protected software was rarely distributed.

	There are many reasons to copy protect software.  The real question
	is, does it gain more sales by forcing people to buy it than it
	costs because people won't buy copy protected software?  My
	personal opinion here is that the dividing line was crossed about
	2 years ago, and that now it doesn't pay to use software copy
	protect (although "decoder wheels", though more annoying in many
	ways than software protection, are a good idea).  The main reason
	for the decline in copy protection is 1) the prevalence of hard
	disks and 2) the decline in level of technical literacy in the
	marketplace.

	As for your assertion that non-protected software was not
	pirated, this is an incorrect assertion.  In the early days,
	the situation was so bad with regards piracy that software houses
	protected software with the expectation of being cracked within
	2 weeks of release and fully pirated within a month; the sole
	purpose of the protection was to protect the program during the
	critical first month of sales; literally, in the hopes that
	people would buy it before they went to their next user group
	meeting.

-- 
Robert J Woodhead, Biar Games, Inc.  !uunet!biar!trebor | trebor@biar.UUCP
"The lamb will lie down with the lion, but the lamb won't get much sleep."
     -- Woody Allen.