6 ms·
iPhone app "piracy" is perhaps a little different from run of the mill software copyright infringement. It's one of the only places around where even for consum
by kolektiv 16y ago
iPhone app "piracy" is perhaps a little different from run of the mill software copyright infringement. It's one of the only places around where even for consumers, there's no way of trying before you buy. I can imagine that there is a significant (I have no idea how large, and not a majority certainly, but significant) number of people who will pirate an iPhone app and then later buy it if they find themselves using it. I'm honest enough to admit that I do this, and I very much doubt I'm alone.
- Quarrelsome 16y agoYou have the same issue in other areas. For example I wanted to check out a multiplayer city builder game with a friend some years back prior to buying and there was no way to do this outside of piracy as the demo didn't cover this feature. Bootnote: We did buy the game following this!
- rmc 16y agoWith Apple's DRM and control of the App Store they could probably create a 'refund within 7 days' thing.
- xenophanes 16y agoA lot of apps, especially games, you can finish using within 7 days (or even 1 day, plenty of iPhone games do not have over, say, 12 hours of gameplay).
- waqf 16y agoA lot of books, especially fiction, you can finish reading within 14 days. I was never made to feel guilty about borrowing those books from the city library, returning them two weeks later and never buying them. When did the standard change?
- alanfalcon 16y agoAn App Store is not a library any more than your local Borders is. At least the copy of the book that's in the library was bought and paid for somewhere along the way.
- jawee 16y agoSince a software download isn´t tangible, it seems to make the library illustration make more sense.
- seabee 16y agoThe library has limited lending ability; you can't lend one book to two people at the same time. It will be very interesting to see how they handle ebooks. I'd be surprised if the publishers didn't enforce scarcity.
- alanfalcon 16y agoLibraries already do lend eBooks, and they do enforce scarcity. You can go today to check out an eBook only to be told that it's not due back for another two weeks.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- rmc 16y agoActually I wonder how you get your 7 day refund for online orders under EU law with the appstore. Anyone any experience with it?
- gyardley 16y agoBack before Pinch Media merged with Flurry, when we had piracy detection in our analytics, we found that less than 1 in 200 people did this. You're not alone, but you're in a small minority.
- moomba 16y agoAndroid got around this by giving people 15 minutes to get a refund. That would make it so there wouldn't be much reason for the pirates to contribute to valid purchases.
- FiddlerClamp 16y agoUnfortunately, that doesn't let you check out apps like alarms. I'd rather they had the ability to let developers choose between 1, 6, and 24 hours.
- oblique63 16y agoWell, with an alarm you could still set it up to go off within 15 mins I'd assume; fairly useless to be sure, but at least it'd give you a way to test out the app's reliability. What bothers me about the 15min limit, is that sometimes the first-time setups/downloads for bigger games already take about 15mins to finish, leaving you with virtually no time left to actually try them out. I know this happened to me with Dungeon Defenders even though I was on wifi while it downloaded its assets. I didn't mind it too much cause the game was decent, but I could easily see this not being the case for other people buying similarly large games.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]