Re: [Avid-L2] Please report Software Piracy

It's a complicated issue - not unlike movie and TV piracy in many ways.

For a business there really should be no excuse for pirating software.
You're making money from it, you should pay for it, simple as that.

On an individual level it's more complicated. There's a strong argument
that, for example, FCP owes much of it's early success to piracy. Namely
that students and hobbyists were pirating the software (it was incredibly
easy to do) and becoming familiar with it (perhaps while learning Avid in
school). When they entered the workforce they took their enthusiasm for FCP
with them.

The same goes for many other applications. I learned to use Photoshop and
After Effect in my own time as a teenager from pirated copies. Since then
I've been responsible for the purchase of many copies in businesses I've
worked for.

As with movie piracy, there's a lot to be said for the idea that piracy
also works as a very effective form of advertising.

The challenge for software companies is finding the right balance between
cost and volume. When I pirated Photoshop in the late 90's there really was
no alternative for me - I couldn't conceivably afford a legit copy and I
wasn't going to be earning any money from it. Now, on the other hand, their
Creative Cloud pricing makes it a lot easy to simply pay for it.

The challenge for companies serving a specialist market (like those making
software Jeff alludes to) is that they're charging very high prices for
niche software into an industry that's working on narrower and narrower
margins. Add to that the fact that technology advances have made it easier
for those companies to have even more workstations and they're software
compliance costs rocket up. There is some obligation on software companies
to take these changing realities into account.

Plugins is a great example - I can pay $50/mth for Adobe Creative Cloud and
put the software on two computers, but there are plugins I could buy (I
don't own currently) that are massively more expensive and are node-locked
meaning I can't use on more than one computer or easily migrate as I can
with the host software.

And then there is piracy that software companies practically force their
customers into. For the longest time, despite owning three legitimate
Windows XP Pro licenses I used a pirated version because the licensed
version stopped automatically activating after I made three hardware
changes.

Dylan Reeve
http://dylanreeve.com/


On Sun, Aug 25, 2013 at 4:55 AM, John Heiser <jpheiser@gmail.com> wrote:

> **
>
>
> On Sat, Aug 24, 2013 at 8:28 AM, Edit B <bouke@editb.nl> wrote:
>
> > Jeff, no, you don't. Please do not speak on my account.
> > As always, things are way more complicated than they seem.
> >
>
> I imagine there are differences in scale and your business models that make
> both of you right in your individual situations.
>
> ----
> *john heiser | senior video editor*
> *o2**ideas*
> birmingham, alabama, USA
> http://vimeo.com/johnheiser
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
>


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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