Well put. I know several people who do go and buy the software after they have tried it for free on download.com for example. I buy my software from there quite often, after a free trial period. The more exposure the more sales...
Quote:
Originally Posted by igorsk
I write software for money.
One piece of software I do (not alone, naturally) costs tens of thousands of dollars. There is some copy protection but it's pretty weak and can be removed by any half-experienced cracker. I've never seen it on torrent sites since it's not something usable by a general user and is not really useful without support.
Another piece is a $15 shareware program. There are cracks readily available but I don't worry about them much. The price is low enough for an impulse buy that most people don't bother wading through all the stuff out there. Also, if the program is warezed it means it's popular. Someone might download an old cracked version then see that the new one is available and just buy it. The sales are pretty good BTW.
Anyway, I agree with mflood: there are much worse things than copyright infrigement (which, incidentally, is not a criminal offence yet in most countries). I'd say, regard it as free publicity: the more your stuff downloaded and passed around, the more people know about it. Many of them would buy your stuff if they needed it and knew about it, and proper PR costs money. Eric Flint described the situation with books pretty nicely in one of his articles, and a lot of his reasoning applies to software:
http://baens-universe.com/articles/salvos7 |