brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) (03/22/84)
I am amazed to see people on the net, most of whom work in software, actually defending copyright violators. Don't you have any interest in your own welfare? Nobody know how much microcomputer software is stolen by people who "just copy it", but I would expect that conservatively one copy is stolen for each legitimate copy sold. Microcomputer software is a billion dollar industry (at least, probably more), so we are talking about probable billions in theft. Billions that were stolen from US. If people paid for the software they steal, I know I would be a great deal richer and so would many of you. Either salaries would be higher or prices of software would be lower due to the increased volume. We must work very hard to combat this attitude. As we enter the so-called "information age", information will become a very important form of property, and thieves will sap our money even more so than they do now. It applies to music, too. How many of you have played thief by taping a record just to save $6 to $10? I admit I used to, but haven't in many years. The other day I met a kid (about 17) in a computer store: Kid: You have a computer Me: Yes, I have several (After all, it's how I make my living) Kid: Do you have a Commodore 64? Me: Yes, I have one of those Kid: Got any games for it? Me: I have written some games, yes. Kid: Wanna trade? Me: For what? Kid: I have [some game] Me: Did you write that? Kid: No, I just got it. Me: You mean you stole it? Kid: No, I copied it. (And he really thought there was a difference) Me: Is it for sale. Kid: No. Well, in the stores I guess.. Me: So you are a thief. Kid: Everybody does it... Me: and that makes theft OK? Kid: Everybody does it. You've seen this kid yourself, I am sure, for he's everywhere. One little copy doesn't hurt the author, just like one little beer can doesn't ruin the park.... -- Brad Templeton - Waterloo, Ontario (519) 886-7304
nather@utastro.UUCP (Ed Nather) (03/24/84)
[]
From brad@looking.UUCP Sun Feb 6 00:28:16 206
I am amazed to see people on the net, most of whom work in software,
actually defending copyright violators.
Don't you have any interest in your own welfare?
Nobody know how much microcomputer software is stolen by people
who "just copy it", but I would expect that conservatively one copy
is stolen for each legitimate copy sold. Microcomputer software is
a billion dollar industry (at least, probably more), so we are talking
about probable billions in theft. Billions that were stolen from US.
If people paid for the software they steal, I know I would be a great
deal richer and so would many of you. Either salaries would be higher
or prices of software would be lower due to the increased volume.
It is the common perception that an object is valuable if it is natural but
very scarce (diamonds) or manufactured and a lot of work went into making it
(automobiles). It is also the common perception that if you can make a copy
of something for $5 that is indistinguishable from the original, that copy
is worth maybe $5, but not $5,000 no matter what anybody else tells you.
I agree with the common perception. The scream that "...it took me two years
to write and debug that program, I wanna be paid!" is no different from the
scream of the novelist or textbook writer under similar circumstances, and
many of them get no real return on the time invested if their product is not
bought by a large number of people. Why should software writers be coddled
with a guaranteed income? If you want to try it on your own, fine -- but
take the risk of failure along with the risk of profit. If you want to work
for a salary, fine -- but don't expect to get rich.
Once the original software author is paid for his work -- at reasonable wages,
let's assume -- then his program is worth just about the reproduction and
distribution costs, and no more than that. Part of the fury directed at the
Arab countries and their oil cartel came from the perception that they were
getting paid a whole lot for doing nothing. They just lived there -- they
didn't drill their own oil wells, build the oil tankers, even turn the
valves: they just sat there and raked in the dough.
So long as the software industry insists on raking in the profits by selling
and re-selling software long ago amortised, there will be software "piracy".
In my view, the software industry is itself seriously guilty of piracy, and I
bitterly resent it. I don't think *any* program should cost more than $100
and any higher price is a rip-off.
There's a simple, direct answer to "software piracy" -- give the customer
the benefit of "cost reductions" after you've paid off the original
development cost of the program. Sell it to them for the cost of the copy
and handling, plus a sensible ( <25%) profit. Then there would be no real
incentive for anybody to steal a copy. Better yet, do a decent job on the
documentation, publish it as a (copyrighted) book, and *give* the program
away. Then you won't look quite so much like Ebeneezer Scrooge.
--
Ed Nather
ihnp4!{ut-sally,kpno}!utastro!nather
Astronomy Dept., U. of Texas, Austinwls@astrovax.UUCP (William L. Sebok) (03/26/84)
I find myself in complete agreement with Ed Nather, who has said what I
would have said but better.
--
Bill Sebok Princeton University, Astrophysics
{allegra,akgua,burl,cbosgd,decvax,ihnp4,kpno,princeton,vax135}!astrovax!wlsmats@dual.UUCP (Mats Wichmann) (03/26/84)
Ed Nather made some excellent points about software piracy/pricing.
We probably DO gouge badly. However, it is also a free market we are
dealing with here - whatever people will pay is the right price.
Software prices are based on bringing in a certain amount of money,
to amortise the development costs and make a profit. I presume books
are priced so that the average book recoups its costs, with a small
profit (or loss, if it really bombs), and the occasional best-seller
is what reaps the profits. Of course, software is still a get-rich quick
area, so MOST products are priced to make a BIG profit, not a `normal'
one (what is a `normal' profit). I think software should be priced the
same way - and if it turns into a hit, then the author/marketer
deservedly turn a big profit.
Just for laughs, imagine we made software free and sold the manual.
There is some precedent for this - for example, there is a BASIC
interpreter (I forget the name) that is public domain, but the
manual costs some bucks. Okay - new can of worms. The software is
packaged this way, and someone gets a copy of a free software
package, then puts out a request on the net for help in using it
so he doesn't have to buy the manual. Do we spend the next six
months deciding if THIS is a copyright violation (:-) ???
Personally, I think that as when the software market matures a little
more, prices will settle down to a level more commensurate with the
production costs, the way books are now. If you borrowed a friend's
K&R C programming manual, and had it Xeroxed, you would be paying
$11.40 (at 5 cents per copy), plus spend a LOT of time doing it
(a copy service wont duplicate it for you). It is clearly worth your
while to go out and spend the 18 or 20 bucks to buy the book. This
is still quite a ways away, and maybe it will never happen, but I think
it will. AT&T may lead the way here - royalties for a binary license
for Sys V, release 2, 1-2 users, is now $60. This is down to the range
where it no longer makes sense to make bootleg copies.
Mats Wichmann
Dual Systems Corp.
...{ucbvax,amd70,ihnp4,cbosgd,decwrl,fortune}!dual!matsron@brl-vgr.ARPA (Ron Natalie <ron>) (03/28/84)
The photocopied manual for my pirated copy of BDS-C had a rather nice personal statement from the author about software piracy. He stated that the reason he was selling his package for such a low price and with no royalty agreements for the libraries or produced code was that he figured the way to make the profit was to make things available at a reasonalbe price so people would buy the legitimate copies rather than inflating the price so much that people wouldn't think twice about copying someone elses. His other motive, he goes on to state, is that he thought C was a good idea, and wishes people to devolop products using it and encourage growth so more people would obtain copies of the compiler and maybe even a few would even purchase it. -Ron
mpr@mb2c.UUCP (Mark Reina) (03/28/84)
Recently I saw on the net comments regarding the first amendment as it applied to school prayer. The writer correctly paraphrased the amendment in that it prohibits the "establishment" of religion. The writer did not see how this could prohibit school prayer. To understand, you would have to read a long line of Supreme Court opinions, as to what constitutes an "establishment" of religion. The court has enunciated that when the state acts affirmatively to favor or support any religious practices, that the state then works to "establish" a religious practice. In the past, the Court has felt state support of school prayer of meditation is an "establishment" of a religious practice. Therefore, such support of school prayer is unquestionably unconstitutional.
geoff@callan.UUCP (Geoff Kuenning) (04/01/84)
> From: nather@utastro.UUCP (Ed Nather) > It is...the common perception that if you can make a copy > of something for $5 that is indistinguishable from the original, that > copy is worth maybe $5, but not $5,000 no matter what anybody else > tells you. > I agree with the common perception. The scream that "...it took me > two years to write and debug that program, I wanna be paid!" is no > different from the scream of the novelist or textbook writer under > similar circumstances, and many of them get no real return on the > time invested if their product is not bought by a large number of > people. There is more than one theory of value in the world. For example, there is the "it's worth what it saves the buyer" theory of value, which is frequently applied in the real world. An example is market research newsletters. Many of these go for subcription prices in the thousands of dollars, and are quite successful in selling subscriptions because the subscribers save tens of thousands based on information in those newsletters that cannot be gotten any other way. You may object on the grounds that the newsletter is worth only research and printing costs, but this is a personal value judgement on your part. The logical extension of that point of view is that newsletter publishers should reduce the price by an appropriate fraction whenever they get a new subscriber (since the fixed research costs are now distributed across a larger customer base). *THAT* violates the common perception that a person who has a good idea that takes off should make out like crazy. As usual, common perceptions, are not consistent or logically thought out. It happens that many software authors also get no real return on the time invested. That's one reason software prices are higher than reproduction costs--somebody has to pay for all of those failed attempts, just like with movies and novels. (The price of a John Le Carre novel includes a pretty hefty premium to cover the money the publisher lost by taking a flyer on Joe Bozo's novel that didn't sell. Is that a "ripoff" too?) > Once the original software author is paid for his work -- at > reasonable wages, let's assume -- then his program is worth just > about the reproduction and distribution costs, and no more than that. What is a "reasonable" wage? VisiCalc has saved the world millions of dollars. Does the author of that program deserve the industry-standard $15-20/hr? > In my view, the software industry is itself seriously guilty of > piracy, and I bitterly resent it. I don't think *any* program should > cost more than $100 and any higher price is a rip-off. That's a pretty strong statement. There are programs for sale in this world which comprise hundreds of thousands of lines of code, and have a very limited market. At $100/copy, it is pretty hard to win back the cost of developing such a program. The extreme case of this is the custom program. I once did a custom highway simulator for the FHWA. It sold exactly one copy--by design. You want me to charge them $100 for that? > There's a simple, direct answer to "software piracy" -- give the > customer the benefit of "cost reductions" after you've paid off the > original development cost of the program. Sell it to them for the > cost of the copy and handling, plus a sensible ( <25%) profit. Then > there would be no real incentive for anybody to steal a copy. This would seem to imply that you want price reductions when a program sells more than your original market estimates. (Market estimate * original price == development cost + "reasonable" profits). That actually happens, and frequently people who bought the product at the original price scream "ripoff" at *THAT*. Or maybe you want us to send out rebates? It certainly could be done (at a large overhead), but I for one wouldn't do that unless you also allowed me to send out supplementary invoices to people who bought products that sold LESS than the original market estimates... > Better yet, do a decent job on the documentation, publish it as a > (copyrighted) book, and *give* the program away. Then you won't look > quite so much like Ebeneezer Scrooge. Now this really shows the bankruptcy of your logic. What do you care if I sell a program cum documentation for $24.95, copyrighting the whole package, or give the program away and sell the documentation for $24.95? (You certainly can't expect me to sell it for less because the program isn't included; my prices are based on what it cost me to develop the program, not what some customer thinks it costs me to reproduce what I sell). The fact of the matter is that we have a whole bunch of ways in our legal system to protect the originator of an idea and give him a way to charge a high, monopolistic price for it. That's all a patent is, and I don't hear any complaints about the high price of (for instance) patented drugs. The name of the game is risk/reward, and most of us won't take risks if we don't have some chance of rewards. Expected values (in the probabilistic sense) actually are quite low; people who violate copyrights and ownership lower them still further and increase the chance that people like Dick Pick and Gene Amdahl won't bless us with major new advances. If you object to our capitalistic society, that's certainly your right. I happen to disagree. I think that the real issue here is that there are people who are frantically seeking to justify their crimes. (Yes, crimes. Even if you think copyrights are wrong, they are the law. And to most of us, law or no law, it is a crime to steal). If it should be OK to steal software because it's easy to copy, then why shouldn't it be OK to steal from a jewelry store? After all, all I have to do is break their shop window. That's pretty easy... Geoff Kuenning Callan Data Systems ...!ihnp4!sdcrdcf!trwrb!wlbr!callan!geoff Vax? Is that a 68000 with the bytes going the other way?
mark@umcp-cs.UUCP (04/02/84)
Since the new U.S. copyright law, there is no contradiction at all
between trade secret and copyright protections. The new law (which
took affect in the mid-seventies, revised '81 or so), permits
copyright of UNPUBLISHED works. The one remaining problem is that
copyright registration requires depositing a copy at the library of congress.
However, for software they only need the first and last 20 pages.
So if your code is large you can put the private stuff in the middle
and you are all set.
But note that registration is not a prerequisite to copyright.
--
Spoken: Mark Weiser ARPA: mark@maryland
CSNet: mark@umcp-cs UUCP: {seismo,allegra,brl-bmd}!umcp-cs!mark