makes you wonder how they came up with these figures though..?

Well, clearly this company should place more restrictive controls on their software in order to force these people to purchase it. If it makes it a little more difficult for the actual paying customers who cares?!? You gotta keep those pirates from playing with your game for free!

There is no way to fully copyright any piece of software that can't be bypassed. Developers know this. Yet they keep stacking more and more copy protection, and DRM into everything. It only serves to make the experience more complicated and unpleasant for the legit users.

There will always be piracy. Either find a pricing scale, or business model that works around it.

I'm not sure if rodney is being serious or not, because some people are actually that fucking stupid.

Assuming he's a a useless piece of existence who shouldn't be allowed to speak, the problem is that if protections are put into the software, the pirates will just remove that and steal the software anyway. The difference here would be that the pirate would be playing an unprotected, less hassle version, while the paying user would have to suffer through hoop jumping for no benefit to the developer. Even less people end up paying for the game, and everyone loses.

Thanks Jason, you put things more eloquently than I did. LOL.

Minus the derogatory assault, I completely agree with you.
The most basic example being no-DVD cracks. Why should I have to sift though dozens of spindles and hundreds of disks, load the one I need into my drive, and wait for a program that's already fully installed on my pc to read the disk, while someone with a cracked version can just click and play? Now I even have to jump through the Games for Windows Live hoop to play
an offline game.

Copy protection software really only hurts one demographic: the paying consumer.

Rodney up there is being sarcastic, in case you haven't noticed
He can't be serious! Think about it

Smells Like Donkey .. Pirates don't steal games and apps to "try before they buy." And the ones that say that are outright liars.

So you and the rest of the corporate world (like the movie & music industries) can cry about all the lost revenue .. or start to ask yourself why people aren't buying your crap in the first place? You have helped create the world we live in (one of consumerism) and need to accept the consequences. I.e. some people won't pay for shitty music, movies, games, apps and some people will!

piracy shall be prevalent forever. they will never stop it on any platform. it is a futile effort on the part of the developers.

Actually, I don't see why the applications aren't tied to your iPhone/iPod in some way. When you click on an icon to purchase the iTunes store should know what device is requesting the app and could include a point of sale compiled bit of code embedded into the application that only allows it to work with that device. If you change devices just remove the old unit and authorize the new one in iTunes. When you go to sync the applications to your new iPhone/iPod iTunes then contacts the server to get the embedded bits for the new device. Same with applications that you purchase at the computer and then add to the device during sync.

Everyone wants to do things like buy an app once and share it with your family and friends, but really the developers should be getting paid for every single instance of the app being used.

when you buy an ipod or an iphones the first thing to do is hack them to improve their functionalities. After this mandatory first step, pirating the soft is just a normal consequence.

BTW to those above that try to make out pirating as the fault of the developers all I have to say is that if an application isn't worth buying, then its not really worth stealing. Any comments to the contrary are just people trying to justify their actions that they know to be wrong.

maybe they should put a kill code into their game so if detected as pirated it shuts down.

It's like the World of Goo guys said - they think that only 20% of people that own the game paid for it, yet they still made a profit and they think that most of the 80% wouldn't have purchased it even if piracy wasn't an issue. They claim that excessive software protection would have hurt their sales more than it would have helped.

So I argue that most of the illegitimate copies of this iphone game wouldn't have been downloaded even if pirating was not an option.

I'm not saying that we should ignore piracy, but 90% the piracy stories are overblown and 10% of the time the truth sets us free.

You guys needs to quit your bitching about DRM and copy protection. Clearly none of you have any works on the iTunes App store or have ever sold anything of value digitally.

Who struck first? The DRM or the thieves? If I spend hundreds of hours working on an application only to find out that 90% of the people using it or playing it STOLE IT I have a right to be pissed and a right to place some copy protection on my software.

If you idiots stopped stealing the DRM would go away because there would be no need for it. But, ironically, instead of blaming the thieves (probably yourselves) you blame the companies who put in the hard work making the games for TRYING TO MAKE MONEY OFF OF THEIR WORK. This is not Soviet Russia. If I make a game it's because I want to make money selling it.

Next time you want to complain about DRM start bitching about the people stealing it because it's THEIR FAULT. 10000% THEIR FAULT.

Piracy rates are not directly correlated to lost sales. Don't assume just because someone pirates a game that they would have bought it.

Developers did that, like EA games, RA2 (not sure of other versions). Program would check if game is not pirated. If game is pirated, and upon starting game and everyone would died. Basically, it didn't work, hackers found another way around it. Like removing kill code.

I still think a better term would be counterfeit software as your making a copy. 90% ouch... Each time I see articles like this I want to know if they sold 1,000 copies or 10,000,000 copies. If its 1,000 then that sucks bad and you only managed to sell 100 copies but out of ten million you still sold a million copies so annoying yes but still you at least get to eat. Part of the try before you buy culture got a huge boost due to review sites becoming corrupted. I can find reviews of software that just is glowing but you go out and buy it only to find that the review was full of crap.

I myself hardly bother any more if I cannot find some one online to ask or a person to ask in person about a piece of software I do not waste my time. (Amazingly youtube has become a decent review site for amateur reviews and I trust those more then I do the online professional sources)

Another annoying thing for this developer must be that both the iPod touch and the iPhone are fairly expensive so unless these people stole it from a friend or a store they probably have the money to buy this stuff if they wanted too.

The internet is what it is. It will NEVER change. If you are going to try to make money on it you are accepting that will happen. Don't like it? then stop making it. The internet isn't yours. It isn't apples. It isn't the gvnmt's. Stop telling me how to use it and my computer.

DRM is just another game to try to solve and unlock.

So how do they know the piracy figures? Pulled it out of their ass did they?

Tayb... your point on whether or not we have things we sell digitally is irrelevant to the argument. The thieves struck first, and developers have a right to be upset so many people pirate. Yes, DRM would go away if piracy didn't exist. But the chances that millions upon millions of software pirates are going to wake up one day and have some kind of moral epiphany are pretty fucking low, don't you think? Also, percentages are based off of 100, you seem to have hit your zero key a few times extra by accident.

The DRM conversation gets down to one question. Just one. "Does DRM software help prevent piracy?". Current evidence suggests the answer is "NO!". Systems like Steam, which also employ DRM, are more likely to work because they offer the user a service, added convienience, and perceived added value for the products they purchase. That's what developers should be concentrating on to make themselves more money. Finding ways to add perceived value to their products... not pissing off the 10% that still pays for them.

Considering these things cost about as much as a mid-range computer unless you get them by locking yourself into a 3 year contract with a cell phone provider, I think I can wait a year or two for the warranty on it to expire before jailbreakig it TYVM.

I personally like the phone compared to the alternatives out there currently, but it would be so much better if it wasn't restricted by apple. Cant wait to see that new Motorola phone.

From what I understand there is specific bit that is set in some sort of software that the better copy programs patch....

Also if X amount of people log on your high score server, but you only sold X amount then it does not take a super math wiz to figure out.

It's much harder to track this kind of things on a PC since most pirates are smart enough to use a good firewall that keeps an application from phoning home.

Jesus... I assumed the sarcasm would be apparent. No amount of restrictions can force someone to buy your product. Some people are just unwilling to pay for stuff... period. They're just making it harder on the rest of us who actually do buy their products from time to time.

If companies Like EA would stop taking good games (command and conquer to name one) and turning them to total complete trash with 0 replay value I'd consider buying it, if only to get a CD key that works online. Im tried of crap being rammed down my throat and how people who "rate" video games are bought off to give bad games good ratings. Make a good game with out DRM, one that I don't need a No CD crack to play with out a CD and i'll buy your game.

I have BOUGHT EVERY valve game to date.
You will NEVER see me buy a EA PoS, Even if it is good.

Ok, I hate DRM because it sucks. I hate pirates because they are the cause of DRM. Unfortunately my bitching won't stop either :-(

When DRM is 100% invisible to legitimate, paying customers and when it allows for 100% fair use by those customers I doubt you'll see as many objections to it. In the mean time, DRM is just a pain in the butt for honest people and in many cases it limits our fair use of what we have purchased.

Steam is the closest thing to good DRM I've seen/used... if only it would let you transfer your games to another account, it would be damned near perfect.

Lighten up Francis.

Yes, people that have their software stolen have the right to be upset. Nobody is saying different. The complaints against copy protection and DRM are about how ineffective they are at stopping piracy. They only make things harder on the legit users.

Second. You are sorely mistaken if you think DRM will die off when piracy does. DRM is used as a way to control your usage. Using DRM music, for instance, requires the use of a licensed device to listen to it. DRM on video discs (DVD, Blu-Ray) means you can't make a backup copy, or store the video you paid money for on a media server. It is just another way for people to control your usage.

Isnt it up to the developer to prevent this?, If they can tell who has a pirated version of the game then they would be able to prevent its use... Makes me wonder if this is just bs or something to whine about...

I really didn't think you were being serious Rodney (I was about 80% sure you were joking), I was just being a little too blunt in the way I feel about people who actually hold such ridiculous opinions. You know, like Tayb. LOL.

Speaking as one of the (probably few) non-pirates around these parts, I appreciate the right of the content owner to protect their copyrights. However, DRM is generally not a wokable solution because it will always be cracked in a matter of time and once it's out in the wild, you will not be able to stop it no matter how much you lock down the retail version. Generally DRM just makes life harder for the people willing to pay money for your stuff, like when Wal-Mart decided to shut down their DRM servers and instantly destroyed the usefulness of MP3s downloaded through their store. The people who bought tracks off of iTunes before DRM was lifted now have a lot of money tied up in something they can't move around. Sony's infamous rootkit fiasco caused legitimate customers a lot of serious problems and opened up their computers to malware because it was never made clear that the music people were buying would fuck with their computers. That incident also made DRM a public concern and probably made customers even more cynical against copyright protections. Spore's install-limiting DRM basically means that people who bought the game early were just renting it instead of owning it. Famously, the cracked version of Spore was actually better in some ways than the retail version because you could re-install it on the same machine as many times as you wanted, so it actually offered MORE functionality than the legit copy. And what good are Kindle books if your reader is given away? Just about the only DRM scheme I've heard people be cool with is Steam, and that's excused because of the value of the service and the good execution (play on any computer with your steam account, for example).
You know all the history already, I'm sure. I'm not saying that most people who pirate would buy the product if there was no DRM, I'm not saying anybody's justified in piracy because DRM schemes often backfire. But there are legitimate complaints about DRM from a non-piracy angle, especially in recent years as many companies have been even more aggressive and restrictive with it. Not only does it make the experience of your product less valuable for the customer 9/10, but it will never be crack-proof and you won't ever be able to DRM your product out of the Usenets or torrents.


There's no signs that piracy has gone down, but Apple and Amazon both sell DRM-free MP3s now. This isn't really an either-or situation, especially since piracy will probably never stop.