11 ms·

Software Piracy and IP Management: Strategic Responses to Imitation

376 points by azalemeth 5y ago

azalemeth 5y ago
For the avoidance of link rot, the full paper is at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3912074 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3912074 A populist lay summary: https://torrentfreak.com/software-piracy-triggers-innovation-research-finds-210902/ https://torrentfreak.com/software-piracy-triggers-innovation...
- dang 5y ago
  We've changed the URL to the paper from https://www.uspto.gov/ip-policy/economic-research/publications/working-papers https://www.uspto.gov/ip-policy/economic-research/publicatio..., which is a list of papers that this one currently happens to be at the head of. We've also changed the title above from "US Patent Office Report concludes software piracy increases innovation", which broke the site guidelines against editorializing: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
  - azalemeth 5y ago
    My apologies Dang – consider me educated for next time.
    - dang 5y ago
      Appreciated!
- koeng 5y ago
  Avoidance of link rot should probably be done with the paper's DOI number - https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3912074 https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3912074
bluejekyll 5y ago
“We conclude that piracy and similar competitive shocks push firms to innovate to stay ahead of imitator products, and that this effect is moderated by their existing patent portfolios.” I guess it’s good to study that this is the case, but isn’t this exactly why companies fight piracy and attempt to patent and then enforce those patents? That is to reduce competition and make it easier to extract value from what they’ve produced? Basically, isn’t the premise that if privacy was rampant and patents didn’t exist then more people and companies would be able to innovate on the technology without fear of a lawsuit? I think of how stagnant the Eink space is, and how much broader usage might that technology get if it wasn’t encumbered by patents (just one example)? I guess I just don’t find this surprising.
- danShumway 5y ago
  I think you might be slightly out of touch with mainstream attitudes/beliefs about what the effects of software piracy are. Personally, it is extremely common for me to find people who argue that piracy reduces innovation and discourages businesses from building new things. I don't have survey data on this, I'm just speaking anecdotally, but I suspect that's the prevailing view among most Americans. I'm not sure if that attitude is as prevalent in other countries. There is a certain group of people where this will basically just confirm some of their priors and it won't be surprising at all. But there is another group of people who (I think sincerely) believe the opposite, and (keeping in mind that this is only one study) I do think it pushes back against their priors in a potentially interesting way.
  - pishpash 5y ago
    It may do both, increase small, incremental innovations and decrease large, R&D-heavy innovations.
  - bluejekyll 5y ago
    Maybe I am out of touch. There is a different question and that’s if piracy is good. That’s a little harder to answer. Piracy is potentially good for the overall market (free innovation, etc). Piracy is probably bad for the company/person who produced the good (ie they lose revenue and have to innovate themselves more to stay ahead of free). The second has been debated at length, and I know I honestly don’t know the answer. I used to see a lot of arguments that piracy can be used as a means to get access to free training and lock-in with a specific product, but then when they go legitimate, they then acquire real licenses. But the producing company has to make it clear that if people don’t go legit, then they will get sued. It’s kinda like the SaaS freemium -> enterprise license models some providers use.
noasaservice 5y ago
Hm. I'm sure it can. However, in my line of work, pirated software leads to furtherance of proprietary and unexportable/hard-to-export file formats that further push others to piracy. Switching to FLOSS systems and open data formats sidesteps this whole issue. With open formats, open specs, and FLOSS implementations means that data is now portable and easier to write translators for. And data is not a roach-motel model, where proprietary software uses that model as a form of lock-in. Tl;dr. Starting off makes sense to pirate. Longterm, FLOSS makes more sense for your data and content. (And, software piracy online feels like the equivalent of jaywalking in terms of "criminality". But this is just a personal feel.)
- rhn_mk1 5y ago
  Best of both worlds, pirate FLOSS :) Which makes sense, given that FLOSS is a legal response to overbearing copyright, and piracy is the practice of ignoring it.
ortusdux 5y ago
I'm pretty confident that Adobe came to this conclusion a long time ago.
- vxNsr 5y ago
  And yet, they’ve made it much more difficult to pirate their suite now… I disagree with anyone who thinks Adobe, Microsoft, or any other software vendor made pirating easy bec it would boost long term sales. 100% of executives are focused on this quarter and nothing else. Bad licensing enforcement was just a by-product of focus, and resources. As we see pirating O365 is impossible, pirating the offline Office suite is doable but much harder than it once was and usually requires buying a volume key instead of downloading a crack. I know pirating Adobe is technically possible but from what I’ve seen requires a lot more work and isn’t foolproof like it once was (download Adobe, click crack on crack software). In general good software licensing frameworks have been commoditized and it’s pretty easy to add to your product. Idk anyone who would look at that and think rolling their own broken solution is better bec it could lead to better long term sales.
  - duxup 5y ago
    >And yet, they’ve made it much more difficult to pirate their suite now… Nobody said you get the innovation you want. :(
    - vxNsr 5y ago
      As in pirating encouraged innovation in licensing? Fair. But it’s not really the argument that most people understand the headline to mean.
  - MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
    I think because of their stranglehold and egregious fees, it's opening up other companies to compete reliably now. Although businesses just don't want to get away from the "Photoshop" or "Premier" name so they just shell out for it when they can easily get by without for way cheaper.
tablespoon 5y ago
From the summary at https://torrentfreak.com/software-piracy-triggers-innovation-research-finds-210902/ https://torrentfreak.com/software-piracy-triggers-innovation...: > The research doesn’t look into specific types of innovation. However, it mentions that in more recent years the subscription model has been embraced by an increasing number of software companies. If the "innovation" is concentrated in anti-piracy technology/practices, then the real implications may be quite different from first glance.
duxup 5y ago
What if the result is everything is a rental / SaaS? For the record I really don't mind SaaS products, they work great in many situations. I just am not sure the innovation is the innovation we want.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  Once we get tired of SaaS, the market will create standalone expensive software. Even if I have to say that the subscription model is pretty good for B2B: fixed expense per month, someone to bother if things don't work, instead of spending my own employees time keeping infra up and debugging bugs. I don't like SaaS for my personal use, I prefer to pay once, keep forever and fix on my own (for similar reasons to why I like cooking my own food instead of ordering take out all the time).
  - duxup 5y ago
    >the market will create standalone expensive software. Maybe even hardware, like a Pi server that serves up the app even...
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  They suck for two reasons: primarily now I need an account for everything I use with separate billing charges. It becomes annoying to manage. The other reason the egregious costs these companies charge. For a compiled version of software back in the day, I could get something that worked for $30-$100 and it would last years if not a decade. Now, some of these places are charging like $3-$20/month! Software value has not increased that much. If I gotta start paying for TODO apps and calendar managers, I'm just gonna move to Org Mode. The majority of what software provides is a nice gui environment to manage text. No clue how this crap can be worth as much as it is aside from supporting multiple platforms and enabling web based usage.
  - abj 5y ago
    We need a SaaS that manages all of these SaaS subscriptions and accounts! That's something I'd pay $10 a month for
AlbertCory 5y ago
"Second, we build a dataset that matches the financial information of publicly traded software firms with (1) R&D expenditures and patent, copyright, and trademark counts, and (2) a unique dataset of pirated software." That's fine, but they're measuring what can be measured easily and calling it "innovation" (at least in the headline), rather than anything meaningful. Having more patent filings doesn't mean you're "innovating" more. Nor does spending more on "R&D" which is mostly just an accounting convention. At two companies, I worked on getting more patent filings, because that was seen by management as The Thing To Do. In both cases, we would ask the engineers "what have you done lately?" and then decide if any of that might be patentable. Usually this involved paying a bounty to the "inventor" if a patent application was filed, and another if the patent actually issued (4-8 years later). In one case for awhile (Google Maps), they were actually paying people a bounty for submitting an idea for a patent, even if no application was filed! I was on the committee that decided if the idea was (1) great, file for sure, (2) pretty good, maybe file, (3) OK but don't file, or (4) so bad you don't even get the idea bounty. (*Full disclosure: I'm pretty sure this system isn't in effect anymore.*) I've written elsewhere [1] about the dubiousness of software patents, so I don't need to explain how they have nothing to do with "innovation." [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2399580 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2399580
- MadcapJake 5y ago
  > I've written elsewhere about the dubiousness of software patents, so I don't need to explain how they have nothing to do with "innovation." Nothing to do with innovation? I'm not convinced. If filing more patents and spending more on R&D is not a sign of (at least a desire for) innovation, what is? I think the biggest challenge with studying this is that how to innovate is going to be wildly different from one firm to the next. Did this study use the best general measures they could? I would say so.
  - AlbertCory 5y ago
    > "the best general measures they could" If you can't put a number on a phenomenon that actually means anything, then saying "well, this is the best we have" is pretty weak. You also said "at least a desire for" which may be your out. I can give other metrics that have been studied, but I think the onus is on you now to justify your claim, or maybe admit that one can't define "innovation."
zozbot234 5y ago
Software piracy might not be as bad as actual piracy of the "attacking ships on the high seas" variety, but it's still pretty unethical, and promotes the spread of proprietary software that does not furher the best interest of its users. Please use fully-FLOSS alternatives instead whenever reasonable.
- jedberg 5y ago
  There is a long standing debate on the ethics. High seas piracy is bad because when the pirate steals, they deprive someone else of their property. But in the digital realm, no one is deprived of anything when someone else steals it, because in almost every case, the person was not willing to pay for it anyway, so there is no loss of revenue. Honestly, there isn't a whole lot of difference between something like open core software or open source with commercial support and commercial software that is easy to pirate. In both cases, the people who are willing to pay will pay and the rest don't.
  - oauea 5y ago
    In some cases it may even increase revenue. There's been multiple times I've pirated a game, only to buy it later to get easy access to updates. Of course a good demo system would help with this, and Steam's refund policy is somewhat a step in the right direction.
  - Dumblydorr 5y ago
    Is it true that no one is deprived of anything in digital piracy? There is surely a group who would not pay anyway, but isn't there another group who would begrudgingly pay but pirates if possible? Does this not deprive the software makers of a bit of sales? Is this a marginal bit or a huge amount of the sales? And does the piracy potentially lead to popularization and more sales? It sounds very tricky to measure these phenomena in software. In music, I think the majority of musicians themselves live off of their fans coming to shows or a small percentage buying the albums, and side-gigs haha. There are probably only dozens lucky enough to get huge payoffs from digital sales.
    - 5y ago
wolverine876 5y ago
> We find that rising piracy increases subsequent R&D spending, copyrights, trademarks, and patents for large, incumbent software firms. Furthermore, copyright and trademark filings precede those of patents, and firms with large patent portfolios disproportionately increase copyrights and trademarks following the shock. We conclude that piracy and similar competitive shocks push firms to innovate to stay ahead of imitator products, and that this effect is moderated by their existing patent portfolios. Is it pushing firms to claim more intellectual property?
platz 5y ago
How is piracy defined here
makotech222 5y ago
Literally ask any marxist about what intellectual property does. We've known this for about 150 years now; private property is a parasite on society.
otrahuevada 5y ago
The biggest issue with "piracy" overall is that it describes a phenomenon where users of an existing platform are sticking to the agreed upon way of using that platform as designed despite corporate lawyers' best attempts at changing terms to try and invent a scarcity where there is none. They tried to invent jaywalking for the web, and it went... poorly. At least outside of corporate-lawyer-heavy circles.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  They're trying to use a system created in the 1700s in the 21st century. They're out of touch. Back then, if you wanted to copy a book, you'd have to do it by hand. You'd need to literally write the words into a new book. Copyright infringement at scale required industrial hardware like printing presses. Distribution required physically moving stuff around. It's the 21st century now. Computers exist and nearly everyone has one. Copying data is a fundamental operation. It's as easy as copy and paste. We can easily create millions of copies of any data in seconds, filling up entire hard drives if we want. We can transmit these copies over the network to any number of computers at negligible costs. These copyright people are so out of touch with reality it hurts. The level of tyranny required to stop this would give any free society pause.
  - hypertele-Xii 5y ago
    It's an interesting topic. I agree with you but let's remember that paper-based information still exists. New books are being written and printed as we speak, and the cost is greater than neglible ($20/book single print). Computer-based information is a very new thing and could potentially vanish overnight to some unexpected space weather. Society hasn't transitioned completely from one to the other. As long as cash exists beside banks' computers, paper information exists and must be given the serious consideration it deserves. The printing press was invented some 600 years ago. Computers have existed for like 50. It's very much "in touch" to not dismiss print.
    - matheusmoreira 5y ago
      Paper exists in the physical world. It makes sense to apply old copyright laws to them. They're physical things, naturally scarce. My argument is that they make no sense in the virtual world. Once information makes its way there, it can be copied and distributed worldwide at negligible costs and with zero limitations. Pretending otherwise means living in denial of reality.
sebow 5y ago
Yea no sh*t, that's why Hollywood allows it (after the obvious defeat from the dot-com era of the internet).
jwhite_nc 5y ago
Adobe had 3 generations of designers, etc hooked on their products because of ease of piracy much like drug dealers giving out samples of crack in early 80s to build their customer base. A large part of "their" patents came from companies they acquired and integrated versus innovating on their own. So I don't think patent portfolios are a good measure. Disclaimer: "May not apply in all situations. Use at your own discretion".
- azalemeth 5y ago
  And now, the zeitgeist is if anything in the opposite direction: Capture One Pro, Raw Therapee, and Darktable have got a hell of a a lot better compared to Lightroom and C1P in particular proudly offers a lifetime license, not a subscription. Similarly, DaVinci Resolve has a free (if not FOSS) business model, designed explicitly to compete with Premiere, and, again, lifetime licenses. Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher are cheap, software that you "buy" and increasingly "good enough" for pro use, to the extent that many post about moving away from the CC treadmill to them. Adobe arguably won this decade on the basis of the three generations you mentioned. I am not confident that they will win the next ones – the last time I printed an actual book, the publisher used CS6 ± Quark XPress internally (I wrote it in LaTeX; they had some tricks for printing it on SRA4 paper and wanted to use those tools to get the bleeds & trims right). The SaaS model was explicitly mentioned as a reason for sticking with the old software.
cletus 5y ago
So there's a tweet I've seen where some anti-vaxxer is asking if anyone else has noticed why all these unvaccinated people are suddenly getting Covid like there's some sort of conspiracy. Sadly it'll probably be taken as "confirmation" of nanobots or something. Of course, this all just misses the point entirely. I have the same feeling about this. It's not that piracy increases innovation. It's that overly restrictive limits stifle innovation and this includes the ridiculous software patent fiasco. It's not really surprising that the Patent Office didn't discover that patents in general and software patents in particular are in fact the problem. There's tons of evidence of this too. The Wright brothers' original patent on flight control completely stifled the aviation industry such that when the US entered World War One they were unable to build planes and they had to buy them other nations. This particular event is why there's a patent pool for aviation now. A smartphone is literally covered by thousands of software patents for completely obvious "innovations". Commercial software tends to have a lot of restrictions such that only paying customers can (legally) use it. Sellers would rather not have someone use it and view them as a potential future sale than risk giving it away for a low or zero price. Many of those people using that software would probably lead to innovation. The lesson here should be that overly restrictive IP enforcement in general is the problem.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jimbob45 5y ago
Piracy would be much easier to enforce laws for if copyright law didn't protect nearly a century's worth of works. If copyright law was something more reasonable, say five years, then the MPAA/RIAA could viciously protect everything within those five years and consumers would more likely stay away from those materials given the negativity of the consequences. The way things are now, you literally have to pirate some games like No One Lives Forever because the copyright law around them is so convoluted that no one knows who can legally sell it anymore. Even worse if you're looking for something like The John Larroquette Show which can't be found anywhere outside of piracy due to a lack of interest by distributors.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Yup. The truth is these copyright holders are nothing but rent seekers. They've created successful works, made their money. When it's our turn to reap the benefits via public domain? They won't accept it. They change the rules of the game instead. They move the goalposts. They lobby the government until copyright duration is functionally infinite because god forbid mickey mouse enters the public domain. Why respect their rights when they don't respect ours? Copyright only works because we pretend their works are artificially scarce. Let's stop pretending.
maram 5y ago
Steve Jobs always quoted Picasso "Good artists copy, great artists steal"
spir 5y ago
As anecdotal and loosely related point, in the ethereum community we think that the unprecedented rapid pace of innovation is largely attributable to the need for smart contracts (and often their UIs) to be open source or users won't trust them.
durovo 5y ago
If you consider SAAS and locked-down subscription models to be innovative, then this is definitely true.
summerlight 5y ago
S. Korea gaming industry once suffered a lot from piracy in 90s. This was a main driver of their rapid transition toward online gaming. In fact, one of the earliest graphical MMORPG was invented by Nexon (a year before UO). Coincidentally, Nexon is also the inventor of loot box which becomes their dominant business model. And I think not many people prefer this over old fashioned game packages. So yeah, piracy could corner industry to "innovate" their product and business model in order to survive. But it's not guaranteed to be in a societally beneficial way.
- faeyanpiraat 5y ago
  Online gaming is a societally beneficial innovation imho.
  - reificator 5y ago
    I agree with that statement. MMOs and lootboxes are a societal harm however.
chadlavi 5y ago
The title of this post was changed from a good summary to the pretty much nonsense businessspeak title of the article.
coretx 5y ago
Piracy, according to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) of 1982, consists of any criminal acts of violence, detention, or depredation committed for private ends by the crew or the passengers of a private ship that is directed on the high seas against another ship, ...
- renewiltord 5y ago
  If you read the article you’ll find that this is exactly what it’s talking about. Ships of yore developed techniques to fend off pirates which eventually led to faster, more reliable shipping.
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
They’re using the release of BitTorrent as a natural experiment here, seeing what happened before and after with a combination of a few techniques (matching, DID, and IV). I’m not convinced that this will say anything more than “after the 90s and early 2000s, firms started doing XYZ.” The causal statement here is plausible, but the methods are unconvincing.
p1mrx 5y ago
I only read the abstract, but why do they conflate "product-market imitation" with software piracy? Doesn't imitation mean creating new software with similar functionality? That would be relevant for patents, but not copyright.
renewiltord 5y ago
Ah, now to see if we have to decide between: - Software patents are not a sign of innovation - Software piracy is good for innovation I have this here in meme form https://i.imgflip.com/5lspw4.jpg https://i.imgflip.com/5lspw4.jpg
duffpkg 5y ago
I wrote "Hacking Healthcare" for O'Reilly, which is still in print after 10 years, amongst others. My intention in writing it was never pecuniary but to hopefully encourage smart technology people to enter healthcare. It has sold more copies than many popular authors I read who seem much more "bestselling", which always surprises me. It is my opinion that piracy has helped that book much more than it has hurt it. It is very widely pirated in torrents in non-us countries from what I can tell from google searches and a longstanding history of emails to the effect "hey your book is being pirated [here]". I sincerely doubt that the overwhelming majority of people who pirate that work did so instead of purchasing it.
- M277 5y ago
  N = 1 here, but as someone from a third world country this is definitely true for my experience. Like, 90% of students here can't really pay US-prices for textbooks at all, so they resort to either piracy or buying imported used books (which are significantly cheaper somehow, but sometimes badly worn or old editions), or even buying printed pirated books. My university department even had someone who would pirate textbooks and print them and sell them to the students at cost (what it cost to print them), he was very popular and people to this day still remember him very fondly as he was arguably doing a major service... the students wouldn't have read the books otherwise. It may be legally wrong in the West, but morally? The author doesn't lose (like I said, the books wouldn't have been bought) and the students get access to knowledge they wouldn't have been able to access otherwise.
- webmaven 5y ago
  > It is my opinion that piracy has helped that book much more than it has hurt it. It is very widely pirated in torrents in non-us countries from what I can tell from google searches and a longstanding history of emails to the effect "hey your book is being pirated [here]". I sincerely doubt that the overwhelming majority of people who pirate that work did so instead of purchasing it. Tim O'Reilly agrees with you: https://www.oreilly.com/content/piracy-is-progressive-taxation-and-other-thoughts-on-the-evolution-of-online-distribution/ https://www.oreilly.com/content/piracy-is-progressive-taxati...
AlbertCory 5y ago
I want to expand on measuring "innovation": Rather than summarily declaring that "filing for IP protection" IS "innovation," the empirical thing to do would be: 1) Collect "ground truth": assemble teams of "experts" in various disciplines, and give them all lists of companies. The teams could be as small as one. They score each company as "innovative" or "not innovative" in some given period of time. If they cannot agree, then you can stop right there. If the teams do not agree with each other, then you can stop. But let's say you do get lists of companies that are agreed as "innovative" or "not innovative." 2) Try out your metric of innovativeness, be it "patents" or "copyrights" or whatever. What is your AUC? Until you do that, you can't say you have a metric of innovativeness.

376 points by azalemeth 5y ago

For the avoidance of link rot, the full paper is at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3912074 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3912074 A populist lay summary: https://torrentfreak.com/software-piracy-triggers-innovation-research-finds-210902/ https://torrentfreak.com/software-piracy-triggers-innovation...

dang 5y ago
We've changed the URL to the paper from https://www.uspto.gov/ip-policy/economic-research/publications/working-papers https://www.uspto.gov/ip-policy/economic-research/publicatio..., which is a list of papers that this one currently happens to be at the head of. We've also changed the title above from "US Patent Office Report concludes software piracy increases innovation", which broke the site guidelines against editorializing: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
- azalemeth 5y ago
  My apologies Dang – consider me educated for next time.
  - dang 5y ago
    Appreciated!
koeng 5y ago
Avoidance of link rot should probably be done with the paper's DOI number - https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3912074 https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3912074

bluejekyll 5y ago

“We conclude that piracy and similar competitive shocks push firms to innovate to stay ahead of imitator products, and that this effect is moderated by their existing patent portfolios.” I guess it’s good to study that this is the case, but isn’t this exactly why companies fight piracy and attempt to patent and then enforce those patents? That is to reduce competition and make it easier to extract value from what they’ve produced? Basically, isn’t the premise that if privacy was rampant and patents didn’t exist then more people and companies would be able to innovate on the technology without fear of a lawsuit? I think of how stagnant the Eink space is, and how much broader usage might that technology get if it wasn’t encumbered by patents (just one example)? I guess I just don’t find this surprising.

danShumway 5y ago
I think you might be slightly out of touch with mainstream attitudes/beliefs about what the effects of software piracy are. Personally, it is extremely common for me to find people who argue that piracy reduces innovation and discourages businesses from building new things. I don't have survey data on this, I'm just speaking anecdotally, but I suspect that's the prevailing view among most Americans. I'm not sure if that attitude is as prevalent in other countries. There is a certain group of people where this will basically just confirm some of their priors and it won't be surprising at all. But there is another group of people who (I think sincerely) believe the opposite, and (keeping in mind that this is only one study) I do think it pushes back against their priors in a potentially interesting way.
- pishpash 5y ago
  It may do both, increase small, incremental innovations and decrease large, R&D-heavy innovations.
- bluejekyll 5y ago
  Maybe I am out of touch. There is a different question and that’s if piracy is good. That’s a little harder to answer. Piracy is potentially good for the overall market (free innovation, etc). Piracy is probably bad for the company/person who produced the good (ie they lose revenue and have to innovate themselves more to stay ahead of free). The second has been debated at length, and I know I honestly don’t know the answer. I used to see a lot of arguments that piracy can be used as a means to get access to free training and lock-in with a specific product, but then when they go legitimate, they then acquire real licenses. But the producing company has to make it clear that if people don’t go legit, then they will get sued. It’s kinda like the SaaS freemium -> enterprise license models some providers use.

noasaservice 5y ago

Hm. I'm sure it can. However, in my line of work, pirated software leads to furtherance of proprietary and unexportable/hard-to-export file formats that further push others to piracy. Switching to FLOSS systems and open data formats sidesteps this whole issue. With open formats, open specs, and FLOSS implementations means that data is now portable and easier to write translators for. And data is not a roach-motel model, where proprietary software uses that model as a form of lock-in. Tl;dr. Starting off makes sense to pirate. Longterm, FLOSS makes more sense for your data and content. (And, software piracy online feels like the equivalent of jaywalking in terms of "criminality". But this is just a personal feel.)

rhn_mk1 5y ago
Best of both worlds, pirate FLOSS :) Which makes sense, given that FLOSS is a legal response to overbearing copyright, and piracy is the practice of ignoring it.

ortusdux 5y ago

I'm pretty confident that Adobe came to this conclusion a long time ago.

vxNsr 5y ago
And yet, they’ve made it much more difficult to pirate their suite now… I disagree with anyone who thinks Adobe, Microsoft, or any other software vendor made pirating easy bec it would boost long term sales. 100% of executives are focused on this quarter and nothing else. Bad licensing enforcement was just a by-product of focus, and resources. As we see pirating O365 is impossible, pirating the offline Office suite is doable but much harder than it once was and usually requires buying a volume key instead of downloading a crack. I know pirating Adobe is technically possible but from what I’ve seen requires a lot more work and isn’t foolproof like it once was (download Adobe, click crack on crack software). In general good software licensing frameworks have been commoditized and it’s pretty easy to add to your product. Idk anyone who would look at that and think rolling their own broken solution is better bec it could lead to better long term sales.
- duxup 5y ago
  >And yet, they’ve made it much more difficult to pirate their suite now… Nobody said you get the innovation you want. :(
  - vxNsr 5y ago
    As in pirating encouraged innovation in licensing? Fair. But it’s not really the argument that most people understand the headline to mean.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  I think because of their stranglehold and egregious fees, it's opening up other companies to compete reliably now. Although businesses just don't want to get away from the "Photoshop" or "Premier" name so they just shell out for it when they can easily get by without for way cheaper.

tablespoon 5y ago

From the summary at https://torrentfreak.com/software-piracy-triggers-innovation-research-finds-210902/ https://torrentfreak.com/software-piracy-triggers-innovation...: > The research doesn’t look into specific types of innovation. However, it mentions that in more recent years the subscription model has been embraced by an increasing number of software companies. If the "innovation" is concentrated in anti-piracy technology/practices, then the real implications may be quite different from first glance.

duxup 5y ago

What if the result is everything is a rental / SaaS? For the record I really don't mind SaaS products, they work great in many situations. I just am not sure the innovation is the innovation we want.

jokethrowaway 5y ago
Once we get tired of SaaS, the market will create standalone expensive software. Even if I have to say that the subscription model is pretty good for B2B: fixed expense per month, someone to bother if things don't work, instead of spending my own employees time keeping infra up and debugging bugs. I don't like SaaS for my personal use, I prefer to pay once, keep forever and fix on my own (for similar reasons to why I like cooking my own food instead of ordering take out all the time).
- duxup 5y ago
  >the market will create standalone expensive software. Maybe even hardware, like a Pi server that serves up the app even...
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
They suck for two reasons: primarily now I need an account for everything I use with separate billing charges. It becomes annoying to manage. The other reason the egregious costs these companies charge. For a compiled version of software back in the day, I could get something that worked for $30-$100 and it would last years if not a decade. Now, some of these places are charging like $3-$20/month! Software value has not increased that much. If I gotta start paying for TODO apps and calendar managers, I'm just gonna move to Org Mode. The majority of what software provides is a nice gui environment to manage text. No clue how this crap can be worth as much as it is aside from supporting multiple platforms and enabling web based usage.
- abj 5y ago
  We need a SaaS that manages all of these SaaS subscriptions and accounts! That's something I'd pay $10 a month for

AlbertCory 5y ago

"Second, we build a dataset that matches the financial information of publicly traded software firms with (1) R&D expenditures and patent, copyright, and trademark counts, and (2) a unique dataset of pirated software." That's fine, but they're measuring what can be measured easily and calling it "innovation" (at least in the headline), rather than anything meaningful. Having more patent filings doesn't mean you're "innovating" more. Nor does spending more on "R&D" which is mostly just an accounting convention. At two companies, I worked on getting more patent filings, because that was seen by management as The Thing To Do. In both cases, we would ask the engineers "what have you done lately?" and then decide if any of that might be patentable. Usually this involved paying a bounty to the "inventor" if a patent application was filed, and another if the patent actually issued (4-8 years later). In one case for awhile (Google Maps), they were actually paying people a bounty for submitting an idea for a patent, even if no application was filed! I was on the committee that decided if the idea was (1) great, file for sure, (2) pretty good, maybe file, (3) OK but don't file, or (4) so bad you don't even get the idea bounty. (*Full disclosure: I'm pretty sure this system isn't in effect anymore.*) I've written elsewhere [1] about the dubiousness of software patents, so I don't need to explain how they have nothing to do with "innovation." [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2399580 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2399580

MadcapJake 5y ago
> I've written elsewhere about the dubiousness of software patents, so I don't need to explain how they have nothing to do with "innovation." Nothing to do with innovation? I'm not convinced. If filing more patents and spending more on R&D is not a sign of (at least a desire for) innovation, what is? I think the biggest challenge with studying this is that how to innovate is going to be wildly different from one firm to the next. Did this study use the best general measures they could? I would say so.
- AlbertCory 5y ago
  > "the best general measures they could" If you can't put a number on a phenomenon that actually means anything, then saying "well, this is the best we have" is pretty weak. You also said "at least a desire for" which may be your out. I can give other metrics that have been studied, but I think the onus is on you now to justify your claim, or maybe admit that one can't define "innovation."

zozbot234 5y ago

Software piracy might not be as bad as actual piracy of the "attacking ships on the high seas" variety, but it's still pretty unethical, and promotes the spread of proprietary software that does not furher the best interest of its users. Please use fully-FLOSS alternatives instead whenever reasonable.

jedberg 5y ago
There is a long standing debate on the ethics. High seas piracy is bad because when the pirate steals, they deprive someone else of their property. But in the digital realm, no one is deprived of anything when someone else steals it, because in almost every case, the person was not willing to pay for it anyway, so there is no loss of revenue. Honestly, there isn't a whole lot of difference between something like open core software or open source with commercial support and commercial software that is easy to pirate. In both cases, the people who are willing to pay will pay and the rest don't.
- oauea 5y ago
  In some cases it may even increase revenue. There's been multiple times I've pirated a game, only to buy it later to get easy access to updates. Of course a good demo system would help with this, and Steam's refund policy is somewhat a step in the right direction.
- Dumblydorr 5y ago
  Is it true that no one is deprived of anything in digital piracy? There is surely a group who would not pay anyway, but isn't there another group who would begrudgingly pay but pirates if possible? Does this not deprive the software makers of a bit of sales? Is this a marginal bit or a huge amount of the sales? And does the piracy potentially lead to popularization and more sales? It sounds very tricky to measure these phenomena in software. In music, I think the majority of musicians themselves live off of their fans coming to shows or a small percentage buying the albums, and side-gigs haha. There are probably only dozens lucky enough to get huge payoffs from digital sales.
  - 5y ago

wolverine876 5y ago

> We find that rising piracy increases subsequent R&D spending, copyrights, trademarks, and patents for large, incumbent software firms. Furthermore, copyright and trademark filings precede those of patents, and firms with large patent portfolios disproportionately increase copyrights and trademarks following the shock. We conclude that piracy and similar competitive shocks push firms to innovate to stay ahead of imitator products, and that this effect is moderated by their existing patent portfolios. Is it pushing firms to claim more intellectual property?

platz 5y ago

How is piracy defined here

makotech222 5y ago

Literally ask any marxist about what intellectual property does. We've known this for about 150 years now; private property is a parasite on society.

otrahuevada 5y ago

The biggest issue with "piracy" overall is that it describes a phenomenon where users of an existing platform are sticking to the agreed upon way of using that platform as designed despite corporate lawyers' best attempts at changing terms to try and invent a scarcity where there is none. They tried to invent jaywalking for the web, and it went... poorly. At least outside of corporate-lawyer-heavy circles.

matheusmoreira 5y ago
They're trying to use a system created in the 1700s in the 21st century. They're out of touch. Back then, if you wanted to copy a book, you'd have to do it by hand. You'd need to literally write the words into a new book. Copyright infringement at scale required industrial hardware like printing presses. Distribution required physically moving stuff around. It's the 21st century now. Computers exist and nearly everyone has one. Copying data is a fundamental operation. It's as easy as copy and paste. We can easily create millions of copies of any data in seconds, filling up entire hard drives if we want. We can transmit these copies over the network to any number of computers at negligible costs. These copyright people are so out of touch with reality it hurts. The level of tyranny required to stop this would give any free society pause.
- hypertele-Xii 5y ago
  It's an interesting topic. I agree with you but let's remember that paper-based information still exists. New books are being written and printed as we speak, and the cost is greater than neglible ($20/book single print). Computer-based information is a very new thing and could potentially vanish overnight to some unexpected space weather. Society hasn't transitioned completely from one to the other. As long as cash exists beside banks' computers, paper information exists and must be given the serious consideration it deserves. The printing press was invented some 600 years ago. Computers have existed for like 50. It's very much "in touch" to not dismiss print.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    Paper exists in the physical world. It makes sense to apply old copyright laws to them. They're physical things, naturally scarce. My argument is that they make no sense in the virtual world. Once information makes its way there, it can be copied and distributed worldwide at negligible costs and with zero limitations. Pretending otherwise means living in denial of reality.

sebow 5y ago

Yea no sh*t, that's why Hollywood allows it (after the obvious defeat from the dot-com era of the internet).

jwhite_nc 5y ago

Adobe had 3 generations of designers, etc hooked on their products because of ease of piracy much like drug dealers giving out samples of crack in early 80s to build their customer base. A large part of "their" patents came from companies they acquired and integrated versus innovating on their own. So I don't think patent portfolios are a good measure. Disclaimer: "May not apply in all situations. Use at your own discretion".

azalemeth 5y ago
And now, the zeitgeist is if anything in the opposite direction: Capture One Pro, Raw Therapee, and Darktable have got a hell of a a lot better compared to Lightroom and C1P in particular proudly offers a lifetime license, not a subscription. Similarly, DaVinci Resolve has a free (if not FOSS) business model, designed explicitly to compete with Premiere, and, again, lifetime licenses. Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher are cheap, software that you "buy" and increasingly "good enough" for pro use, to the extent that many post about moving away from the CC treadmill to them. Adobe arguably won this decade on the basis of the three generations you mentioned. I am not confident that they will win the next ones – the last time I printed an actual book, the publisher used CS6 ± Quark XPress internally (I wrote it in LaTeX; they had some tricks for printing it on SRA4 paper and wanted to use those tools to get the bleeds & trims right). The SaaS model was explicitly mentioned as a reason for sticking with the old software.

cletus 5y ago

So there's a tweet I've seen where some anti-vaxxer is asking if anyone else has noticed why all these unvaccinated people are suddenly getting Covid like there's some sort of conspiracy. Sadly it'll probably be taken as "confirmation" of nanobots or something. Of course, this all just misses the point entirely. I have the same feeling about this. It's not that piracy increases innovation. It's that overly restrictive limits stifle innovation and this includes the ridiculous software patent fiasco. It's not really surprising that the Patent Office didn't discover that patents in general and software patents in particular are in fact the problem. There's tons of evidence of this too. The Wright brothers' original patent on flight control completely stifled the aviation industry such that when the US entered World War One they were unable to build planes and they had to buy them other nations. This particular event is why there's a patent pool for aviation now. A smartphone is literally covered by thousands of software patents for completely obvious "innovations". Commercial software tends to have a lot of restrictions such that only paying customers can (legally) use it. Sellers would rather not have someone use it and view them as a potential future sale than risk giving it away for a low or zero price. Many of those people using that software would probably lead to innovation. The lesson here should be that overly restrictive IP enforcement in general is the problem.

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jimbob45 5y ago

Piracy would be much easier to enforce laws for if copyright law didn't protect nearly a century's worth of works. If copyright law was something more reasonable, say five years, then the MPAA/RIAA could viciously protect everything within those five years and consumers would more likely stay away from those materials given the negativity of the consequences. The way things are now, you literally have to pirate some games like No One Lives Forever because the copyright law around them is so convoluted that no one knows who can legally sell it anymore. Even worse if you're looking for something like The John Larroquette Show which can't be found anywhere outside of piracy due to a lack of interest by distributors.

matheusmoreira 5y ago
Yup. The truth is these copyright holders are nothing but rent seekers. They've created successful works, made their money. When it's our turn to reap the benefits via public domain? They won't accept it. They change the rules of the game instead. They move the goalposts. They lobby the government until copyright duration is functionally infinite because god forbid mickey mouse enters the public domain. Why respect their rights when they don't respect ours? Copyright only works because we pretend their works are artificially scarce. Let's stop pretending.

maram 5y ago

Steve Jobs always quoted Picasso "Good artists copy, great artists steal"

spir 5y ago

As anecdotal and loosely related point, in the ethereum community we think that the unprecedented rapid pace of innovation is largely attributable to the need for smart contracts (and often their UIs) to be open source or users won't trust them.

durovo 5y ago

If you consider SAAS and locked-down subscription models to be innovative, then this is definitely true.

summerlight 5y ago

S. Korea gaming industry once suffered a lot from piracy in 90s. This was a main driver of their rapid transition toward online gaming. In fact, one of the earliest graphical MMORPG was invented by Nexon (a year before UO). Coincidentally, Nexon is also the inventor of loot box which becomes their dominant business model. And I think not many people prefer this over old fashioned game packages. So yeah, piracy could corner industry to "innovate" their product and business model in order to survive. But it's not guaranteed to be in a societally beneficial way.

faeyanpiraat 5y ago
Online gaming is a societally beneficial innovation imho.
- reificator 5y ago
  I agree with that statement. MMOs and lootboxes are a societal harm however.

chadlavi 5y ago

The title of this post was changed from a good summary to the pretty much nonsense businessspeak title of the article.

coretx 5y ago

Piracy, according to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) of 1982, consists of any criminal acts of violence, detention, or depredation committed for private ends by the crew or the passengers of a private ship that is directed on the high seas against another ship, ...

renewiltord 5y ago
If you read the article you’ll find that this is exactly what it’s talking about. Ships of yore developed techniques to fend off pirates which eventually led to faster, more reliable shipping.

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago

They’re using the release of BitTorrent as a natural experiment here, seeing what happened before and after with a combination of a few techniques (matching, DID, and IV). I’m not convinced that this will say anything more than “after the 90s and early 2000s, firms started doing XYZ.” The causal statement here is plausible, but the methods are unconvincing.

p1mrx 5y ago

I only read the abstract, but why do they conflate "product-market imitation" with software piracy? Doesn't imitation mean creating new software with similar functionality? That would be relevant for patents, but not copyright.

renewiltord 5y ago

Ah, now to see if we have to decide between: - Software patents are not a sign of innovation - Software piracy is good for innovation I have this here in meme form https://i.imgflip.com/5lspw4.jpg https://i.imgflip.com/5lspw4.jpg

duffpkg 5y ago

I wrote "Hacking Healthcare" for O'Reilly, which is still in print after 10 years, amongst others. My intention in writing it was never pecuniary but to hopefully encourage smart technology people to enter healthcare. It has sold more copies than many popular authors I read who seem much more "bestselling", which always surprises me. It is my opinion that piracy has helped that book much more than it has hurt it. It is very widely pirated in torrents in non-us countries from what I can tell from google searches and a longstanding history of emails to the effect "hey your book is being pirated [here]". I sincerely doubt that the overwhelming majority of people who pirate that work did so instead of purchasing it.

M277 5y ago
N = 1 here, but as someone from a third world country this is definitely true for my experience. Like, 90% of students here can't really pay US-prices for textbooks at all, so they resort to either piracy or buying imported used books (which are significantly cheaper somehow, but sometimes badly worn or old editions), or even buying printed pirated books. My university department even had someone who would pirate textbooks and print them and sell them to the students at cost (what it cost to print them), he was very popular and people to this day still remember him very fondly as he was arguably doing a major service... the students wouldn't have read the books otherwise. It may be legally wrong in the West, but morally? The author doesn't lose (like I said, the books wouldn't have been bought) and the students get access to knowledge they wouldn't have been able to access otherwise.
webmaven 5y ago
> It is my opinion that piracy has helped that book much more than it has hurt it. It is very widely pirated in torrents in non-us countries from what I can tell from google searches and a longstanding history of emails to the effect "hey your book is being pirated [here]". I sincerely doubt that the overwhelming majority of people who pirate that work did so instead of purchasing it. Tim O'Reilly agrees with you: https://www.oreilly.com/content/piracy-is-progressive-taxation-and-other-thoughts-on-the-evolution-of-online-distribution/ https://www.oreilly.com/content/piracy-is-progressive-taxati...

AlbertCory 5y ago

I want to expand on measuring "innovation": Rather than summarily declaring that "filing for IP protection" IS "innovation," the empirical thing to do would be: 1) Collect "ground truth": assemble teams of "experts" in various disciplines, and give them all lists of companies. The teams could be as small as one. They score each company as "innovative" or "not innovative" in some given period of time. If they cannot agree, then you can stop right there. If the teams do not agree with each other, then you can stop. But let's say you do get lists of companies that are agreed as "innovative" or "not innovative." 2) Try out your metric of innovativeness, be it "patents" or "copyrights" or whatever. What is your AUC? Until you do that, you can't say you have a metric of innovativeness.