| From: | Don Cox |
| Date: | 16 Aug 2000 at 11:00:54 |
| Subject: | Re: Amiga Piracy |
Hello Gary
On 16-Aug-00, Gary Peake wrote:
>
> I am curious as to what people think would be the appropriate approach
> to piracy (theft)?
Attractive packaging and a good, well printed manual. Make people want
to own an original. Enjoy the sales you do get and ignore the pirates.
You have to think of the CD as an inducement to buy the book and
packaging.
In the case of games, the market is the person who wants an original
boxed copy of a new game as soon as it comes out. A person who doesn't mind
giving the game a try on a gold disk so long as it comes free was never
a market in the first place. There's no point in trying to _sell_ to
cheapskates or the penniless - the profitable business in that market is
moneylending.
Selling information as opposed to equipment has the enormous advantage
of very low manufacturing costs - almost zero if you sell over the
Internet. Piracy is the natural downside of this.
Hardware is expensive to manufacture, but likewise less likely to be
pirated. I've never seen a pirate A1200.
When Commodore were selling computer hardware, nobody worried about
piracy of the OS - it came free as an inducement to buy the hardware,
especially in the bundle packs. OTOH if you sell a naked OS without hardware,
you see piracy as a loss, because other people are making the profits on
the hardware.
One route out of this is to sell the OS to the hardware manufacturers,
rather than to the end users. This can be done with programs, too, as we
see with MS Office. In the case of Amiga, one market is as an OS for
handheld devices, musical instruments, etc where no owner could or would
install the OS himself. Imagine selling AmigaOS as the standard OS for
everything made by Yamaha, for instance (including showers and
motorbikes!). That would be millions of copies, and the numbers can be
audited.
If OEM sales like this are 95% of the company's income, pirate copies
used by individuals clever enough to install an OS on a PC become an
advertising medium, not a business loss. This seems to be Microsoft's
business model, and it works for them - that's why they are so anxious
to extend from office computers to consumer devices.
(Of course the OS has to have a clear cost advantage over Linux to be
interesting to manufacturers. For instance, the saving on RAM etc would have
to be greater than the license fee.)
Shutting down Warez sites is a good thing, but not because it reduces
piracy. It is good because it broadcasts the message that your products
are of value and are worth fighting over. This enhances the perceived
value of the originals.
Regards
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