Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!pasteur!bellatrix!carlson From: carlson@bellatrix (Richard L. Carlson) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Software Development And Piracy (Spurred By FTL replies) Message-ID: <8153@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> Date: 9 Dec 88 02:01:27 GMT References: <555@icus.islp.ny.us> <12325@cup.portal.com> Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU Reply-To: carlson@ernie.Berkeley.EDU (Richard L. Carlson) Organization: University of California at Berkeley Lines: 55 In article <12325@cup.portal.com> FelineGrace@cup.portal.com (Dana B Bourgeois) writes: >Eric Hyman lists 5 classes of pirates. (I won't list them here 'cause I don't >remember what they all are). I maintain that his #2 is NOT a pirate. >... Am I a pirate now? No! All software I currently have has >been purchased by me and paid for. Was I a pirate in the past? I don't think >so, but others might. Would I do this again? You bet! I want to know that I >can really USE that $40 package(or $400 package) before I buy it. I can't say that I condone even this type of "pirating". But we definitely need *some* method of protecting consumers from bad software. Software is not like a TV, where you can glance at it in a store and immediately see if it's going to satisfy all your needs. Software is much more complicated. And a lot of the idiotic aspects of poorly-written software show up only after you've used it for a while. Coincidentally, I've just started paying attention to the TV ads that guarantee your full money back if you're not satisfied with whatever they're selling; even if you've used up whatever that was. It seems to me that something along these lines is what we need for software: an advertised, up-front policy that guarantees you'll get your full money back if you're dissatisfied with a product for any reason. Now, I claim that this will satisfy almost all of today's "legitimate pirates" that just want to test-drive software, and *also* allow software to be free from copy protection. Why? Well, say that all dissatisfied customers must return the software directly to the manufacturer. Then, the manufacturer can maintain a database of all people that have requested refunds for software. And, gasp, the software publishers could even *share* their information to find "often-returners". So a pirate could buy a piece of software, copy it, and then get a refund on the original disk, but he would be in someone's database. And he could rest assured that if he did this very often, he would arouse suspicion. Hopefully, this would not even cause legitimate users to be harassed, because they could supply legitimate reasons for returning the software that they could not use, even if they returned a lot of programs. And another factor to consider is that this scheme would not suffer the same fate as shareware. In fact, it would *benefit* from the "inertia factor": after buying a piece of software, someone would have to go to extra work to get his money back, and so only people with serious complaints about a product would be likely to return it (as opposed to shareware, where only people that are exceptionally impressed with a product [plus a few all-around "good-guys" :-)] will bother to go to the extra effort of sending the author money). I know this is a pretty simplistic picture of things, but I think it makes a good place to start working for a copy-protection-free world. And maybe some publishers actually allow you to do this anyway; but if so, they sure don't advertise it. Just a thought... -- Richard carlson@ernie.Berkeley.EDU