Comment by vladms
1 month ago
Pirating is more of a problem of mismanaged price versus revenues. In the '90 in East Europe everybody was pirating because we couldn't afford any software not because "we wanted to steal". As soon as I got a decent salary I just bought the damn stuff and spared me of the headache of dealing with pirated things.
The people pushing for drastic technical measures to "prevent pirating" are probably accountants, that have no other idea of how to generate value and they imagine all "pirated content" will be converted to paid - which is not the case.
I live in Nigeria and I hate piracy, yet books her are so darn expensive that the average middle class citizen resorts to piracy. I think regional pricing will really help out with this.
> spared me of the headache of dealing with pirated things
Without any sort of DRM and today's internet speeds, pirating digital media would probably be like Napster
Greenheart Games famously purposely released a different version of Game Dev Tycoon for pirating. You can read the blog post here: https://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when...
Most of the software I use depend on centralized functionality. Example: convenient online invitation, sharing of resources and integrations (for productivity), accomplishments, ladders and updates (for games).
For music media, there are a lot of people (67%) using streaming (random source: https://ifpi-website-cms.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/IFPI_GMR...) which is a totally different service than having a list of songs on your device then struggling with organizing/synchronizing/keeping up to date.
Media and software do not "work" like physical goods. Value should be extracted from them but a lot of earth population is poor and could still "use" the media/software (example: 57% of world population has less than 10$ income per day source: https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$model$markers$mountain$enc...)
Regional pricing based on Purchasing Power Parity could be a solution. However, perhaps too many customers would use VPNs and pretend to be from the poorest countries on Earth.
1 reply →