Software Piracy - Secretly The IT Industry's Best Asset?
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As all best ideas tend to, this occured to me at roughly 15:32 whilst firmly esconced on the crapper at university today. It was an idea concerning software piracy (warezing) of high-level, expensive development packages by young kids in their basements across the world. Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Interdev, Maya, 3DsMax, Windows Server 2003, that sort of caper...
In my intermittent four years as an IT contractor with a number of support and design firms I have used most of the above applications to get my job done. Most of them are hideously complex to operate at a professional level. They're also devilishly expensive to purchase.
Whenever I've purchased my fully legal copies of the above from reputable suppliers, I've regularly noted how flimsy the anti-piracy protection is on these applications. In a world where probes splash down on Titan and entire Genomes are mapped; it's funny that the absolute best measure for defeating determined pirates and warez-monkeys is a string of 16 alphanumeric characters adhering to a very deducable code.
I wondered why this was the case. Then the idea struck - because it is in the interest of software houses to let people pirate their applications! It's so obvious of course. The entire anti-copy protection, flimsy serial numbers and product keys are an elaborate and paper-thin facade to make it appear like they care. Piracy is probably part of their marketing strategies.
It's simple. Photoshop costs the best part of $700 - something that design firms can easily afford. But design firms need designers, and designers have to come from somewhere without being paid first. Strangely, it's usually those kids in their basements. They can't afford the $700 - so how can they learn the applications? If they didn't pirate Photoshop to learn it, there'd be no designers, no design firms, and certainly nobody paying Adobe their $700 for a legal in-house version.
So it makes blistering sense. The copy protection is so laughably bad because Adobe must let a considerable number of wannabe-designers have it free-gratis, in order that they learn it well enough to graduate to paying-jobs with design firms that pay Adobe's wages at the end of the day.
Without software piracy, there would be virtually no IT professionals in any capacity anywhere in the world.
Now i'd also like to add that in addition to getting trained people in their software, for free, they also make more money by hiking prices even more, on the grounds that "software piracy cuts deep into their profits"!
Very interesting....
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