id CEO Claims PC Hardware Manufacturers Love Piracy 676
arcticstoat sends a link to an interview with the CEO of id Software, Todd Hollenshead, in which he suggests that hardware manufacturers count on piracy to help drive profits, rather than doing something to prevent it. Quoting:
"...I think that there's been this dirty little secret among hardware manufacturers, which is that the perception of free content — even if you're supposed to pay for it on PCs — is some sort hidden benefit that you get when you buy a PC, like a right to download music for free or a right to download pirated movies and games. ...And I think that just based on their actions...what they say is one thing, but what they do is another. When it comes into debates about whether peer-to-peer file-sharing networks that by-and-large have the vast majority, I'm talking 99 per cent of the content is illicitly trading copyrighted property, they'll come out on the side of the 1 per cent of the user doing it for legitimate benefit."
What a secret! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What a secret! (Score:4, Interesting)
Precisely, that's been the case for decades. Back 20 years ago, it was pretty much assumed that when you got a computer people would come over with disks of commercial software that would be installed.
It makes it hard for me to take piracy complaints seriously since, the actual rates are probably only a fraction of what they used to be. Sure that means more piracy in terms of numbers, but a much smaller amount in terms of actual percentage of users.
Confused CEO (Score:4, Interesting)
But does it run Linux? (Score:3, Interesting)
If the claim in TFA were true, wouldn't we see lots of manufacturers pushing Linux? If they see pirated software as having a significant effect on demand for their product, they should see free software as having the same effect?
I suspect that they are just indifferent.
Re:Simplest solution to stopping "piracy" (Score:2, Interesting)
Tell that to the folks that are paid because if intellectual property.
The problem is, in reality, all "intellectual property" has maybe five years left to it. At that point the non-cooperation between nations will mean that if it isn't stolen and remarketed by someone in the West, it will be done from Asia. The pirates are there today with a goal of eliminating the revenue from digital media as well.
Creativity will NOT be rewarded in the future. Too bad, because we have so little of it anyway.
The real problem (Score:1, Interesting)
When you have paid for the hardware needed to play those games, you don't have enough money left to pay for the games. You could try to buy low-end hardware so you could afford to pay for the games, but they would be barely playable on a shitty resolution (rather buy a Wii instead :) ). So you choose the lesser of the two evils : pay the high-end hardware and pirate the games.
That's how hardware manufacturers profits from piracy. The solution of this problem would be making games playable on low-end hardware. :D
Re:What a secret! (Score:5, Interesting)
These days, if my parents buy a computer from anywhere that isn't a big box store, they expect it to come pre-loaded with software - even though they havn't paid for it. Otherwise, the computer doesn't "work", and they've asked them to fix it. That is the price for their customer loyalty (and money).
If I buy a computer with no software, it isn't a problem. I'm plenty capable of installing thousands of dollars of pirated software on it - by my self.
Counting on Piracy? (Score:2, Interesting)
Numbers and Guilt (Score:3, Interesting)
2) Even if that were true (and I doubt it... I'll give him that most peer-to-peer is probably illegal, but 99%...? Really?), is it still fair to punish the 1% of us that use Bittorrent for Linux ISO's, free software, or the odd WoW patch?
3) Even if ISPs did do away with / block bittorrent or other P2P traffic, you really think the geek thinktank that is the Internet wouldn't come up with something else? Hell, you really want to stop piracy, we oughtta do away with this "Interweb" thingy!
Give it up, gang. No matter what you do, somebody's gonna find a way to steal your crap. Deal with it, and move on. Quit punishing the rest of us for it.
Screw the Other Guy and Pass the Savings on... (Score:4, Interesting)
And again, why should they care? Piracy is not their problem, and it's not worth their R&D time to bolt 'trusted computing' modules onto their products. Suggesting that they have an obligation to act is like suggesting that firearm manufacturers have an obligation to prevent gun-related crimes.
Re:Simplest solution to stopping "piracy" (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:years ago Piracy give windows and office a big. (Score:2, Interesting)
I disagree. Years ago, when PCs cost a hell of a lot more, you actually got full versions of MS Office on your computer, along with a licensed copy of Windows. People building their own systems have pretty much always been in the minority (except a loooong time ago), and pre-built systems from any major manufacturer have always had licensed copies of Windows.
Office stays popular among consumers today probably due to piracy. How many people do you think actually paid $500 for Office Pro? Heck how many paid $150 for Student and Teacher edition? Disks get shared around, borrowed from work or school volume licenses, etc. I would say businesses, in general, pay for most of thier copies of Office, and always have.
U.S. government is on the side of murderers, too! (Score:3, Interesting)
(caveat: in theory; in practice District Attorneys, and other prosecutors, are more than happy to convict people of crimes they know damn well the defendant didn't commit to further their own agenda(s). In theory, theory always works. In practice it often doesn't.)
Re:What a secret! (Score:5, Interesting)
PC games were pirated too, just as much if not more than Amiga games...
There were still plenty of games coming out, they just weren't as good as other platforms any more... The other platforms had caught up and surpassed the Amiga. Piracy had very little to do with it, although the rampant anti-piracy brigade did a lot to drive what few Amiga users had internet access away from the platform....
Pay for a TCP stack...
Pay for a (pretty crap) telnet client...
Pay for a (massively inferior to other platforms) web browser...
Pay for an IRC client
I mean come on, what other platform did quite so much to discourage uptake of the internet? And if you did pirate any of those apps, you could expect to be shunned from any amiga related forums.
The IRC client especially had a backdoor allowing people to see if it was pirated or not, if you went on irc to an amiga related channel with a pirated client you would get banned.
I recently tried setting up an old amiga i had in my loft, i was unable to acquire any of the software aside from demo versions... Even if i was willing to pay for it, none of the sites which sold it are still up, the only versions available are crippleware which crash out after 30 minutes.
How easy one forgets (Score:3, Interesting)
Lame logic (Score:4, Interesting)
The only real difference between a software product and a hardware product like a car is that the "manufacturing plant" for software product usually costs about $1000 operable by a single person, whereas the one for car costs $1,000,000,000 and must be operated by a team of people.
I'm always amused by the level of altruism of people in the software field -- to the point of idiotic -- no professionals in other fields are so eager to eliminate their competitive barriers.
Re:But does it run Linux? (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps it's more obvious to me because I know some of them. ;-)
And this might surprise you, but of the folks I know who work at Microsoft, I can't think of one who doesn't own a Mac and/or also run Linux. They take note of what works and adapt it.
The people who say "OMG, Windows is unusable, GNOME is so awesome," etc. etc., are doing more harm to their cause than good. The majority of people who claim that GNOME, KDE, or whatever else is great are generally just used to its failings. (I'm including myself in this; for a long time I held up KDE as being absolutely awesome. Then I went back to Windows and realized that both have pluses and minuses, and both have very stark minuses when compared to the other.) The negatives matter far more than the positives, and the developers need to see those negatives because blowjobs over the positives don't improve the product.
Re:For hard drives, this is probably true (Score:5, Interesting)
My wife and I, when we combined our CD collection, realised that we had over 300 CDs, with only a handful of duplicates. Our DVD collection is perhaps only 100 or so.
We easily have > 500GB (depending on encoding quality) of media, and I can point to physical discs we've encoded from.
Now maybe it did cost $6000, although I'd say it was far less, but over 20 years of collecting music and stuff, I'd be surprised if by age 35 anyone buying an iPod could *not* fill it with their own stuff. Before we combined I had 30GB of music from my CD collection.
Don't buy into Steve Ballmer's line about iPods being full of pirated material.
Re:What a secret! (Score:3, Interesting)
and sadly, people still pirate $10 cell phone games, software which takes huge amount of work compared to Windows or even OS X. Even more sad? They are running them on $500 smart phones. So there comes DRM, accepted evil being such a de facto standard that I have 3 separate DRM frameworks on my smart phone running Symbian.
Re:Our worldview differ simply because (Score:2, Interesting)
That's bullhockey.
You can buy an osx capable first gen intel macbook for 500 bucks off ebay.
You don't have to join anything. Their dev tools are free and their documentation is open on their website and available through onboard files.
You don't even have to use apple's SDK either, you can just use the interface builder and link it to a pure posix backend.
I think you're a consultant alright, and i think your primary employer is microsoft. That's the only way i can conceivably think anyone would put out that much blatant FUD.
You want to know what it cost my friend to start developing small finished apps on osx? 30 bucks for a book to learn objective c, and that's it!