5 ms·

There are many things one can do which lead you to have less profit. One can run false advertisements, hire mercenaries to attack your factories, dump below-pr

by blagie 5y ago

There are many things one can do which lead you to have less profit. One can run false advertisements, hire mercenaries to attack your factories, dump below-price goods on the market (and jack up prices once you're out-of-business), sign exclusive anti-competitive deals with your suppliers, vandalize your employee's homes so none want to work for you, and so on. No one would argue that any of those are ethical, but none of those are theft. Confusing words like this is a standard tactic, but it's not conducive to having reasoned discourse. It's also not conducive to attack a straw man. You put a lot of words in my mouth. I said we shouldn't impose Western IP regimes on other nations. You somehow changed this to music piracy in the west. There's no logical connection there either. As a footnote, on the topic of piracy in the west: when I was in college, there was a lot of copyright infringement. None of those kids had money to buy what they were pirating. A couple of decades later, no one I knew from college infringes on copyrights. The lost profits were zero. Indeed, in some cases, people bought software they pirated in college because by that point, they were used to it. It's in discussing scenarios like that when the analogy to theft breaks down. The tools for addressing it are different. As a matter of policy, it makes the most sense to target places where there is the most capacity for losing profit. One example of an IP regime which I thought was clever -- from an Eastern European country shortly after the fall of communism -- only criminalized copyright infringement for non-minors. If I child wanted to copy a $5000 CAD program or a $200 IDE to learn to use it, it was legal. Copyright enforcement started once kids hit 17 (and was enforced). The West forced the country to shut down that "loophole," but it seemed like a reasonable policy to me.

ls65536 5y ago
> Indeed, in some cases, people bought software they pirated in college because by that point, they were used to it. This reminds me of some old reasoning for why many software vendors would often tacitly go easy on those copying their software, as it was often seen as a wide pipe to eventual revenue down the road. Rather than letting those (potential) eventual customers go to the competition early on (often much less expensive to purchase, or perhaps even "free"), they would get comfortable with the proprietary features of a certain piece of software and be "locked in" that way. Of course, this practice would be unlikely to ever be officially acknowledged by the software vendor(s), but the people who understood this made "business sense" knew what they were doing.
- blagie 5y ago
  Some of this was pretty explicit and pretty well documented. In the late nineties, Microsoft strategically encouraged piracy in many developing countries, to develop lock-in. This wasn't just comfort; once a country has infrastructure built around Windows, from scripts, to data formats, to workforce skills, to everything else, it's almost impossible to switch off. At the time, the plan was to crack down once countries developed a little bit and could afford to pay. Indeed, many years later, Microsoft then cracked down on piracy when countries reached middle income. I'm not familiar with Microsoft to know if that was intentional follow-though on the original strategy, or coincidental. By the time the crackdown happened, Microsoft was a very different (and much less strategic) company with different people. In either case, they came out way ahead for it.
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    > Speaking at University of Washington, Bill Gates said: “Although 3 million computers get sold each year in China, people don’t pay for our software. Someday they will, though, and as long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”
- analog31 5y ago
  Not just vendor lock but also stifling competition by letting the "free" version set a price ceiling for alternatives.

by blagie 5y ago

ls65536 5y ago

> Indeed, in some cases, people bought software they pirated in college because by that point, they were used to it. This reminds me of some old reasoning for why many software vendors would often tacitly go easy on those copying their software, as it was often seen as a wide pipe to eventual revenue down the road. Rather than letting those (potential) eventual customers go to the competition early on (often much less expensive to purchase, or perhaps even "free"), they would get comfortable with the proprietary features of a certain piece of software and be "locked in" that way. Of course, this practice would be unlikely to ever be officially acknowledged by the software vendor(s), but the people who understood this made "business sense" knew what they were doing.

blagie 5y ago
Some of this was pretty explicit and pretty well documented. In the late nineties, Microsoft strategically encouraged piracy in many developing countries, to develop lock-in. This wasn't just comfort; once a country has infrastructure built around Windows, from scripts, to data formats, to workforce skills, to everything else, it's almost impossible to switch off. At the time, the plan was to crack down once countries developed a little bit and could afford to pay. Indeed, many years later, Microsoft then cracked down on piracy when countries reached middle income. I'm not familiar with Microsoft to know if that was intentional follow-though on the original strategy, or coincidental. By the time the crackdown happened, Microsoft was a very different (and much less strategic) company with different people. In either case, they came out way ahead for it.
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  > Speaking at University of Washington, Bill Gates said: “Although 3 million computers get sold each year in China, people don’t pay for our software. Someday they will, though, and as long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”
analog31 5y ago
Not just vendor lock but also stifling competition by letting the "free" version set a price ceiling for alternatives.