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Xenophon · 03-31-2009, 11:03 AM

@HarryT: I fear that your US readers may not understand about the UK's "public lending right" system. For those not in the know, here goes: In the UK and some other countries, libraries pay a per-checkout fee into a common pool of money. They also track which books are checked out. The pool is divided up periodically (prorated by number of checkouts), and money is paid to the copyright holders. Said money is capped at a maximum of XXX pounds. I don't know whether non-UK authors get anything from this pool.
@HarryT: You might to well to attach "in the UK" to your statements that "authors get paid when you check out a book from the library."

@MoeJoe (and others) on theft, bits, and potentially infinite replication: I've been on both sides of this issue during my time in the software industry. I worked for many years at a startup company that produced high-end compilers and development tools for the embedded systems industry. My paycheck depended directly on the company being paid for its products.

Should we have given away the product? (Actually, we did give it away to Universities for instructional use. Or evaluation copies to just about anyone who asked. But I digress.) Richard Stallman (and the gcc folks) think the answer is "yes." But then, gcc is still substantially inferior to what we were selling -- even 13 years later. In fact, we didn't care about 'minor piracy' (think home or hobby use of a non-licensed copy) -- those folks could never have purchased the product in the first place, and weren't worth pursuing (from a business perspective)! But if you were making any substantial use of our products, you could bloody well pay for what you're getting.

To dispose of the free software arguments: sure, gcc was free. We thought gcc was wonderful. It acted as a minimum bar to entry into our market -- if your product wasn't very significantly better then gcc, you couldn't compete and your company went out of business. And from our point of view, that bar was quite low and easy to leap; it was easy to compete with... for us. Gcc cleared away about a dozen annoying competitors with sucky products, who competed successfully only because their sleazy salespeople lied convincingly. That was great!

As for DRM, well, our 'DRM' was lawyers and law enforcement. When the product is expensive -- typical individual sales were way over $100K -- copy protection is the wrong approach! The motivation to crack your DRM is too high, so that approach is doomed. But any user who could reasonably purchase the product will surely pay up when approached by a law-firm with a legitimate claim. That's just business. In fact, later on when we switched to 'per-seat' licensing (as an optional alternative to 'per site' licensing), our customers asked us to track the number of seats in use so that they could pay for additional seats if they needed them. They were perfectly willing to pay... as long as we provided value.

The only piracy we ever had trouble with is sort of a funny story. One day we got a support call from a (British) Royal Navy installation in... Singapore? Hong Kong?? ...anyway, in the Far East. The project was one of those "If we told you what we're doing, we'd have to kill you" things, and it was years ago, so I'm not completely clear on the details. They'd purchased our products from our Far East distributor, had a problem, and wanted support.

The only problem is that we didn't have a Far East distributor!

The RN, being a fundamentally ethical group, promptly paid us for the license they thought they'd already purchased (and sicced the law on the folks they'd bought from originally).

In the case of the RN installation above, they didn't "steal" anything. After all, we still had a copy of the bits of the tools! But if we took that attitude with every potential sale, the company couldn't have existed and the products wouldn't have been available at all.

Xenophon

P.S. Where's that company now? We were acquired by a multi-billion-dollar hardware manufacturer, who promptly pitched the entire product line and re-assigned the engineers to work on other things. They effectively wasted many millions of dollars! Go figure.

03-31-2009, 11:03 AM	#106
Xenophon curmudgeon Posts: 1,487 Karma: 5748190 Join Date: Jun 2006 Location: Redwood City, CA USA Device: Kobo Aura HD, (ex)nook, (ex)PRS-700, (ex)PRS-500	@HarryT: I fear that your US readers may not understand about the UK's "public lending right" system. For those not in the know, here goes: In the UK and some other countries, libraries pay a per-checkout fee into a common pool of money. They also track which books are checked out. The pool is divided up periodically (prorated by number of checkouts), and money is paid to the copyright holders. Said money is capped at a maximum of XXX pounds. I don't know whether non-UK authors get anything from this pool. @HarryT: You might to well to attach "in the UK" to your statements that "authors get paid when you check out a book from the library." @MoeJoe (and others) on theft, bits, and potentially infinite replication: I've been on both sides of this issue during my time in the software industry. I worked for many years at a startup company that produced high-end compilers and development tools for the embedded systems industry. My paycheck depended directly on the company being paid for its products. Should we have given away the product? (Actually, we did give it away to Universities for instructional use. Or evaluation copies to just about anyone who asked. But I digress.) Richard Stallman (and the gcc folks) think the answer is "yes." But then, gcc is still substantially inferior to what we were selling -- even 13 years later. In fact, we didn't care about 'minor piracy' (think home or hobby use of a non-licensed copy) -- those folks could never have purchased the product in the first place, and weren't worth pursuing (from a business perspective)! But if you were making any substantial use of our products, you could bloody well pay for what you're getting. To dispose of the free software arguments: sure, gcc was free. We thought gcc was wonderful. It acted as a minimum bar to entry into our market -- if your product wasn't very significantly better then gcc, you couldn't compete and your company went out of business. And from our point of view, that bar was quite low and easy to leap; it was easy to compete with... for us. Gcc cleared away about a dozen annoying competitors with sucky products, who competed successfully only because their sleazy salespeople lied convincingly. That was great! As for DRM, well, our 'DRM' was lawyers and law enforcement. When the product is expensive -- typical individual sales were way over $100K -- copy protection is the wrong approach! The motivation to crack your DRM is too high, so that approach is doomed. But any user who could reasonably purchase the product will surely pay up when approached by a law-firm with a legitimate claim. That's just business. In fact, later on when we switched to 'per-seat' licensing (as an optional alternative to 'per site' licensing), our customers asked us to track the number of seats in use so that they could pay for additional seats if they needed them. They were perfectly willing to pay... as long as we provided value. The only piracy we ever had trouble with is sort of a funny story. One day we got a support call from a (British) Royal Navy installation in... Singapore? Hong Kong?? ...anyway, in the Far East. The project was one of those "If we told you what we're doing, we'd have to kill you" things, and it was years ago, so I'm not completely clear on the details. They'd purchased our products from our Far East distributor, had a problem, and wanted support. The only problem is that we didn't have a Far East distributor! The RN, being a fundamentally ethical group, promptly paid us for the license they thought they'd already purchased (and sicced the law on the folks they'd bought from originally). In the case of the RN installation above, they didn't "steal" anything. After all, we still had a copy of the bits of the tools! But if we took that attitude with every potential sale, the company couldn't have existed and the products wouldn't have been available at all. Xenophon P.S. Where's that company now? We were acquired by a multi-billion-dollar hardware manufacturer, who promptly pitched the entire product line and re-assigned the engineers to work on other things. They effectively wasted many millions of dollars! Go figure.