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Cost of App Store Piracy Pegged at $450 Million

Eso said:
That's not the case with digital content, however, which can be duplicated. There's a completely different psychology associated with it. Digital copies are an infinite resource which naturally results in a zero price point. From a standpoint of pure market economics, there's no stealing involved.
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Which still makes no sense at all the way you word it because just about any product on the market can be duplicated.

There isn't just one Ford Focus there are millions. The Focus is just made up of atoms which can be found anywhere.

I don't think anyone would mind if I take a copy of a few ZILLION atoms.
 
disconap said:
Not entirely true. And the opensource market has led to innovations in the private market that may never have existed before. The main reason the profit motive has contributed more to innovation is that it is larger and has been around longer (though I agree with the basis of your point, see my last post).
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Balderdash. Other than a few successes that mostly appeal to geeks, open source has utterly failed at producing software desirable to the general public (that is, not without corporations, seeking profit, getting involved and adding their own goodies).
 
To anyone saying piracy is theft, I'm here to say that... Well, it's just not.

Theft is depriving someone of property. Piracy is obtaining an unauthorised copy of something. Very different. The law agrees with that, too - no one pirating has ever been charged with theft as a result, have they?
 
JohnDoe98 said:
Please enlighten me how you would accomplish this without violating my privacy rights.
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They could, just as a for instance, find a source of illegal apps on the web/torrents, get a warrant, trace all the packets, and find out your IP, which they can then cross-reference to you via your ISP (probably without a warrant since courts have found that you have no expectation of privacy with respect to packets you send out onto the net, and most ISPs simply turn over the info without a warrant).
 
kingtj said:
Oh geez... are we *really* going here?
Again, very different situation!

Psystar was *making a profit* selling systems with Apple's operating system pre-installed on them, without getting legal permission from Apple to do so. The real "sticking point" here is that customers were essentially lied to by Psystar. The company presented itself as legally able to provide the end-user with an OS X compatible machine running OS X, when that wasn't the case at all.

I have NO problem with someone building their own "hackintosh" machine, buying a copy of OS X for themselves, and proceeding to hack around to make it all work. In that scenario, everyone wins, really. Apple made money selling another copy of OS X to someone. PC hardware manufacturers made some money selling another motherboard, CPU, RAM, power supply, case and hard drive. The user paid for every single item he/she used, so no "theft" involved. AND, there was no "middle man company" involved, falsely promising the solution had some sort of legal "support" as part of the deal.

Things get very different when you try to sell products you're not legally entitled to sell, vs. sharing a copy of one without profiting financially at all from said sharing.
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But surely its not stealing as people have posted many times on this thread that if its just code and not a materialistic product then its not stealing
 
0dev said:
To anyone saying piracy is theft, I'm here to say that... Well, it's just not.

Theft is depriving someone of property. Piracy is obtaining an unauthorised copy of something. Very different. The law agrees with that, too - no one pirating has ever been charged with theft as a result, have they?
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They've been charged with violating various statutes in title 17 of the United States Code.
 
cmaier said:
Balderdash. Other than a few successes that mostly appeal to geeks, open source has utterly failed at producing software desirable to the general public (that is, not without corporations, seeking profit, getting involved and adding their own goodies).
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Appeal to the general public is not something to judge success or failure by. Neither is "appealing to geeks."
 
cmaier said:
Balderdash. Other than a few successes that mostly appeal to geeks, open source has utterly failed at producing software desirable to the general public (that is, not without corporations, seeking profit, getting involved and adding their own goodies).
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For full software, I point to OpenOffice and Firefox, which appeal to a huge audience.

But what I was saying was innovations, not full solutions. IE and Safari are both browsers which have instituted aspects based on the overall Mozilla project (which includes Firefox). Like, for example, tabbed browsing, which was not invented by Mozilla, but they were among the first to implement it into a browser (and the resultant projects spread the popularity of tabs, which are now part of every browser). So that implementation, or innovation, led to almost every modern browser containing tabs, and the majority of people utilizing them.

EDIT: Ironically, OpenOffice is a great example of the opposite of my point.
 
0dev said:
I think you'll find it does. If you download an unauthorised copy of something for private use, it's a civil matter. If you make money from unauthorised copies of things, it turns criminal. There is massive difference between the two.
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Criminal copyright infringement does not require selling copies for profit.

kingtj said:
That's not traditionally true at all!

Until the DMCA was passed in 2000, the original wording of the copyright law made a distinction that an infringement was NOT a criminal offense if an "attempt to gain financially from the infringement" couldn't be shown. It *also* said that more than 10 copies had to be made of a given work to qualify.

IMHO, that made MUCH more sense than what it was changed to later....
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That doesn't change what I said. It's also not true.

disconap said:
This statement is odd, as it is one of the primary motivations for the existence of said laws...
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Maybe I said it badly. Profiting from copyright infringement does affect punishment. But whether Psystar sold their systems or gave them away for free does not affect whether or not they were committing copyright infringement.
 
All of this jailbreak talk is well and good, but I'd have to say that the most common way for a lay person to pirate apps is simply by using the same iTunes account across multiple phones.

For example, my wife and I use the same iTunes account (have since it's inception), so anything she purchases for her phone can be downloaded for free on my phone.

Do I think Apple is losing lots of money via this method? No.
Do I think it happens and is much more common than a jailbreaking method? Probably. Just think of all those households where the family has one account but 2+ phones. My wife and I have no similar interests in apps, but this certainly results in lost revenue for the developers, especially with high price apps.
 
cmaier said:
They could, just as a for instance, find a source of illegal apps on the web/torrents, get a warrant, trace all the packets, and find out your IP, which they can then cross-reference to you via your ISP (probably without a warrant since courts have found that you have no expectation of privacy with respect to packets you send out onto the net, and most ISPs simply turn over the info without a warrant).
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Thanks for the response. I'm not sure if that would hold up in court though as I imagine a defense could be easily conjectured up. Further, it does not strike me as a financially viable option for the department of justice to undertake. I think they have more important fish to fry with their limited resources.
 
JohnDoe98 said:
Neither, based on need. The quickest way to get someone to contribute back to society is to give him the things he needs to do so.
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No argument there. But at what point does need become indulgence? Like, to use a parable, do we keep giving man fish, or do we teach him to fish? And how does that effect a distribution of wealth model? Even Marx had problems with that, and just basically accepted that some will always take advantage of what is offered and not contributed, which is one of the reasons IMO that his philosophies were strictly economic and not political...
 
BaldiMac said:
Maybe I said it badly. Profiting from copyright infringement does affect punishment. But whether Psystar sold their systems or gave them away for free does not affect whether or not they were committing copyright infringement.
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Apologies, there are so many posts and threads of conversation that I didn't realize the example in question was Psystar...
 
cmaier said:
There's no such statute as "theft." There are common law crimes such as robbery, larceny, etc. and statutory equivalents. No one is ever charged with a count of "theft."
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Right. As I said earlier, theft is a descriptive term (or even a class), not a specific crime.
 
cmaier said:
There's no such statute as "theft." There are common law crimes such as robbery, larceny, etc. and statutory equivalents. No one is ever charged with a count of "theft."
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And what do robbery and larceny have in common? They both require depriving someone else of property - the very definition of theft!

Again, piracy is not depriving anyone of property, and can therefore not be classed as theft.
 
cmaier said:
There's no such statute as "theft." There are common law crimes such as robbery, larceny, etc. and statutory equivalents. No one is ever charged with a count of "theft."
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Nobody that pirates an app is charged with robbery or statutory equivalents, either. Because it's not robbery. Which is why all of the stupid arguments using car and snickers bar analogies don't even apply to the problem.

I think that was the point I was trying to make.
 
disconap said:
Right. As I said earlier, theft is a descriptive term (or even a class), not a specific crime.
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Exactly. Under common law, the closest equivalent might be trespass on chattels, since in both cases there is no permanent depriving of physical property. I guess. Of course IP theft is about depriving me of an intellectual property (an exclusive right) and not physical property.
 
disconap said:
No argument there. But at what point does need become indulgence? Like, to use a parable, do we keep giving man fish, or do we teach him to fish? And how does that effect a distribution of wealth model? Even Marx had problems with that, and just basically accepted that some will always take advantage of what is offered and not contributed, which is one of the reasons IMO that his philosophies were strictly economic and not political...
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Let's leave Marx out of this for now. The simple answer is that it is preferable to have some indulgent/lazy members of society as opposed to having mostly greedy ones.
 
miles01110 said:
Nobody that pirates an app is charged with robbery or statutory equivalents, either. Because it's not robbery. Which is why all of the stupid arguments using car and snickers bar analogies don't even apply to the problem.

I think that was the point I was trying to make.
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If you pointed a gun at me and forced me to let you make an unauthorized copy of my app, then I assure you you'd be charged with robbery (which requires threat of physical force). You could also be charged with larceny, but since that's generally a misdemeanor the victim would prefer to charge you under 17 USC where, in additional to criminal sanctions, he can also get statutory damages (that is, preset amounts of money that have nothing to do with the value of what you stole).
 
JohnDoe98 said:
Let's leave Marx out of this for now. The simple answer is that it is preferable to have some indulgent/lazy members of society as opposed to having mostly greedy ones.
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But, much like Marx (last mention I promise), I'm truly interested to know if the lazy/indulgent would exist without the most greedy...
 
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