Articles » Teddy Bear Piracy
A man goes to a store, sees something nice (say, a teddy bear), checks whether it is available elsewhere for a better price and eventually buy it for the lowest price available. A man sees a computer game, checks its price, if the price isn’t lower than a few bucks, pirate it over his internet connection or borrow a copy from a friend. That’s the background of most modern software pirating stories. The teddy bear analogy is used here for the sake of simplicity and proof of concept whist regardless of the commodity we may use in comparison, software pirating is happening at an unbelievable rate.
A respectable member of the society will never attempt to steal a teddy bear from a department store although he may be well pirating software over the internet at home. But there must be reasons for this dualistic human-behavior for the same type of action; the same type of misbehavior. Read through my analysis as to why people steal software but not teddy bears in the modern society.
Tangible vs. intangible
The concept of stealing has a strong association to the tangible nature of an item. Software is intangible; you do not feel it. It is just an arrangement of bits and bytes on your hard disk or other type of media. You would feel wrong to steal a teddy bear from a department store but not to illegally download a copy of a software title over the internet. This intangible nature is also the reason for most other reasons why software is pirated.
A Replica
People do not feel wrong about replicating. On this forum post at Mininova.org the user has posted an interesting argument on stealing a cow versus replicating the same: if you steal a cow, then the owner of the cow will suffer from the los of it; if you replicate the cow instead, then you don’t actually take away anything from the rightful owner. It’s the notion ‘I’m just replicating – not stealing’.
Who gets hurt?
It is the software giants that get hurt with pirating and they already have ample amount of money in their pockets. People often think ‘the 50 dollars I do not give them are negligible in sight of their current wealth’. Even for tangible items, if the party is in concern is filthily rich; people assume that the items stolen will go unnoticed due to the ample amount of resources the wealthy claim. Remember Robin Hood?
I pay for my internet connection
Most software pirating is domestic and people often download software using their own internet connection. For this reason the notion ‘I pay for my internet connection’ renders a thought of justification in downloading software. This holds the same for duplicating software titles on removable media such as CD or DVD as the recipient has already purchased the blank media himself.
Readily available
Pirating is readily available and can be done from home. An internet connection, a mechanism to pirate (such as BitTorrent) and the knowledge on completing the process is all it takes for the completion of a successful pirating cycle. The flip side of this is that unlike other commodities, a software title cannot be evaluated at a store because of its intangible nature. People prefer to first try it at home and then but it legitimately; which to the most part end up remaining ‘evaluating indefinitely’.
Lack of pricing model
Software doesn’t have a proper pricing model. Often people believe that software titles are pricy. The same kind of software comes in various price bands. Since there is no proper gauge to measure the value of a software title, people recent to pay the right amount of money the developer deserve.
Disclaimer: cover pic by jesus_leon