[OT] - does IP exist?

[Jb]

"downs" <default_357-line at yahoo.de> wrote in message 
news:g86h0t$2dur$1 at digitalmars.com...
>>
> I wouldn't pay for the stuff I pirate. I pirate english movies because I 
> don't
> like watching German movies. Take Dark Knight. I want to watch it. But I
> don't want to watch it enough to see the German version, or enough to go
> and import a DVD. If there were no P2P networks, I would _never_ watch it.
>
> So the fact that I'm probably going to pirate it in half a year or so does
>  _not_ equate to a lost sale.

It may not result in a lost sale directly. But if you couldnt get the Dark 
Knight for free, or couldnt download Photoshop for free, you would probably 
be more inclined to pay for other things.

I mean sure most people who pirate Photoshop wouldn't pay the $200 (or 
whatever it is) to buy the legit version. But by pirating photoshop they are 
satisfying a need they have that would likely have to be satisfied by 
cheaper alternatives.

So Adobe may not have lost a sale but someone else has.


> FWIW, I pay for many of the games I play. And I have a legitimate reason 
> to
> download them first - Linux :) There's a high chance that the game won't 
> work
> anyway.

Well to be honest I do download pirate software / music. But if i use / 
listen to somthing I generaly pay for a legit version.


>> Well there's still some percentage of what they pirate that they probably
>> would have paid for. So it does still hurt developers / producers.
>>
>
> But less than is commonly claimed.

I'm sure people on both sides exagerate the figures.


>> I know quite a few developers in the pro audio industry who have seen 
>> their
>> sales fall through the floor as soon as their software turns up on bit
>> torrent / rapidshare ect. And I really mean dropped by 80%. It's why so 
>> many
>> pro audio companies are adopting hardware dongles.
>>
>> I offer an open challenge to any of freeloaders to put a possitive 
>> communist
>> spin on that.
>>
>
> I'd like to see the numbers on that.
>
> Specifically, number of IPs that downloaded the software, as compared
> to precise sales figures.
>
> It sounds like somebody saw their sales going down, and went out to find a 
> reason.

Well I dont have sales figures, but i've heard the same story from 3 
different developers. Ok 80% was the worst case scenario.

That said, it's got to be bad or why would so many pro audio developers, 
(and some of these are small developers, 1 or 2 employees), go to the 
trouble of using hardware dongles, which chop 20-30% off their profits? Not 
only do users have to buy the dongle themselves, developers have to licence 
the drm software, and the hassle of building it into their apps.

And on top off that they loose a fair percentage of existing customers 
because many people simply wont use dongled products.

I guess the point is that even if only 10% of pirate copies equate to a lost 
sale, or money not spent in the industry, that could very well be 50% of 
sales for *some* developers.

Whether this is just somthing that's particulary bad in the audio software 
industry I dont know, but of all my musician freinds I cant think of any who 
would pay for software when they can get it for free. I can remember getting 
"huh.. you piad for it??" quite a few times when telling them about some new 
plugin / app i bought.

They are happy to spend $4000 on a custom bass, or an electonic kit, or a 
sampler, but software.. well they dont need to so they dont.