In defence of piracy

[SvennoJ]

I've been on both sides and piracy sucks.

When I was young piracy was deemed normal. Music, just copy the tape. Movies, just copy the VHS. Games, meet up in special events and copy everything. So to combat that blank tapes etc increased in price... Extra tax on all writable material because it can (and usually will) be used for piracy.

Then I started working for a small software company. We didn't have any copy protection, couldn't really spend any resources on that. And at some point our stuff got pirated. At first you think, he that's cool, people like it so much they are willing to steal it. Yet then we were forced to fire people because we ran into money issues. Perhaps if some of those pirates had actually bought the software they would still have had a job.

The company recovered and grew so now we added anti piracy measures, also mandated by the other company we worked with to protect their data. It was a pain in the ass for testing and development. Previously it was a beta version that had leaked onto the web so now anti piracy measures had to be there all through development. Damn annoying when trying to find bugs as you can't simply copy everything over to another device to test as it was all encrypted with the device ID.

But the biggest piracy of all came in the form of patents. We didn't have money in the beginning for patents either, so a much bigger company tried suing our company over similarities with vague software patents, trying to get our product banned from the shelves. That cost millions of dollars in litigation plus a lot of effort to buy and build a portfolio of patents to protect our own software and use as leverage to fight of patent cases.

Then there are the Chinese copy cats you can't do anything about :/

All piracy sucks.