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Cost of App Store Piracy Pegged at $450 Million
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Austria, not Australia.So it´s civil law state.
Wow. Es tut mir leid. Ironically I'm of Austrian descent. Speak German and everything. I'm reading on my iPhone and missed it.
In that case, yes, in non-common law jurisdictions (France, Germany, Louisiana, etc) the answer may be quite different.
Open source licenses are not EULAs; they grant you additional rights above and beyond what copyright law provides. You don't have to "agree" to them to use the software.
Merely using open source software can't put you in violation. Redistribution can, for example if you modify a GPL program and release your modified binaries without the source. But in that case you'll be sued not for "violating the GPL" but for copyright violation. Copyright law says you can't distribute copies, the GPL relaxes that under certain conditions, but since you didn't fulfill those conditions it doesn't apply and therefore you're in violation of copyright.
Piracy is around since the BBS days or even before, since the Commodore days (or even earlier). If you became a programmer after the 80s and decided to make a living on consumer software, you should have been aware of that.
Just make apps like Pocket God or Zen Bound (there are many others) and you will sell your sh*t easily; or at least won't care if it is pirated.
Just make apps like Pocket God or Zen Bound (there are many others) and you will sell your sh*t easily; or at least won't care if it is pirated.
As a musician, I always use this analogy:
What if you programmed a website for a client. They were going to pay you $5,000 for this website. All of a sudden your website goes live with someone else's name on it. They 'copied' the code and images you were going to use and just took them.
Is that stealing? I would say yes.
What if you programmed a website for a client. They were going to pay you $5,000 for this website. All of a sudden your website goes live with someone else's name on it. They 'copied' the code and images you were going to use and just took them.
Is that stealing? I would say yes.
You can say whatever you want. Its not stealing/theft, its a copyright violation. People only call it "stealing" because of the MPAA's tv ads that compared stealing a car to downloading a movie. I'll tell you one thing, if i could download a car you can bet your ass i wouldn't be driving a focus.
Or, more likely, they call it stealing because, I dunno, it's theft.
Theft is defined at common law as as an unauthorized taking, keeping or using of another's property which must be accompanied by a mens rea of dishonesty and/or the intent to permanently deprive the owner or the person with rightful possession of that property or its use.
Everyone trying to justify their theft as not theft is attempting to pretend that the definition of theft is: an unauthorized taking or keeping of another's property which must be accompanied by the intent to permanently deprive the owner or the person with rightful possession of that property or its use.
It's not. By your definition of theft it would be impossible to steal a service, steal cable TV, etc. It's not.
if you live in some civil law jurisdiction like France, then fine, but in the U.S., England, Australia, and any former British colony or protectorate, you've got to deal with the definition above.
Technically, law doesn't grant rights, it limits them. But you're right, you don't have to agree to these licenses.
However, what they have in common with EULAs is that they both are an expression of the developers' will. Copyright law effectively serves as the basic contract which license agreements can modify in certain ways.
"Piracy" would not cease to exist if you abolished copyright law. It would merely become violation of contract, because no author has any obligation to give you their work on any other terms than the ones they agree with.
Posts like this make me want to stop arguing about this. You are just blatantly ignoring everything i've typed.
Its impossible to "steal" data unless you break into someones house, copy stuff onto your thumb driev, and erase the original. Copying the data is not theft, its a copyright violation. Neither is better than the other, but they are two different crimes that cant be lumped into one. You can keep spewing the MPAA's propaganda BS about "stealing" a movie by downloading on the internet, but nothing has been stolen, merely copied.
Example:
An american company makes a TV. They sell the tvs to the public. Someone in another country, lets say Canada, purchases a tv and disassembles it, makes their won schematics, and builds a replica using their own material and gives it to their neighbors for free. By your logic the new Canadian tv has been stolen from the American factory. It has not, they've violated numerous copyright and patent laws, but they've stolen nothing.
Now lets say someone goes to walmart and buys a copy of 500 Days of Summer on dvd (i just watched that, its pretty good) and takes it home. There they break the encryption, rip it to an avi file, and use their own bandwidth to distribute it free to their neighbors. The movie has not been stolen. Nothing has been removed from anyone else's possession, just copies being made.
Stealing != copying. Its really not a difficult concept. Im not saying either action is by any means acceptable or tolerable, but you cant combine them into one just to make it more accessible and sound scarier to the public.
He's blatantly ignoring everything you type because you are making up your own limited definitions of theft. He is quoting legal definitions. I have quoted definitions from a dictionary. Stealing has multiple definitions, some of which support the statement that copyright infringement is stealing.
You've ignored the simple definition of theft. Are you using someone else's intellectual property without permission? Check. Do you know you aren't supposed to do that, and thus have a mens rea of dishonesty? Check.
Is it also a copyright vilolation? Of course.
You keep trying to add requirements to theft. Breaking into a house? That's burglary. Depriving me of my own use o the property permanently? That's larseny. Theft only requires you using my property dishonestly. Period. Copyright infringement, just like stealing cable, or skipping out on a dinner bill, is theft.
You state your opinion but give no evidence that it's right. I've given you the precise definition of theft under common law.
Is it also a copyright vilolation? Of course.
You keep trying to add requirements to theft. Breaking into a house? That's burglary. Depriving me of my own use o the property permanently? That's larseny. Theft only requires you using my property dishonestly. Period. Copyright infringement, just like stealing cable, or skipping out on a dinner bill, is theft.
You state your opinion but give no evidence that it's right. I've given you the precise definition of theft under common law.
Yes. I'd call that plagiarism or stealing. You are taking someone else's work and calling it your own. Same if you download Photoshop and delete "Adobe", write your name on it, and sell it. In that case, you have stolen photoshop, just like you have stolen that website.
Hence why your analogy is nothing like piracy. Piracy, or copyright infringement, does not steal or claim ownership of an artist's creative product.
For the people calling piracy "theft", and claiming that a pirated good takes away a sale, please tell me your thoughts on the following scenarios of legal vs illegal, but with the same consequences:
Pirating a game, vs buying it second hand. The developer makes no money on either. (Actually one of the reasons I buy new, as well as not getting a scratched up disc.)
Pirating a book/film/game, vs borrowing it from a friend, watching/reading/playing it completely, and returning it. Once again, no new profits from either, same outcome.
TIVOing a TV episode without ads and watching it vs downloading the same episode that someone else uploaded to the internet?
Pirating software that cannot be purchased anymore, eg retro game ROMs. The line "If you aren't willing to buy something, don't pirate it.", comes to mind, but many people, myself included, are willing to pay for ROMs, but there isn't a legal solution in most cases. Same with TV shows that have aired in the USA, but not Australia, with no legal way to watch them, unless you want to wait an increasingly long time.
I try to avoid piracy as much as possible and support artists and devs, but I also hate the fact that legitimate purchasers are treated like criminals with DRM and "You wouldn't download a bus" messages that pirated copies don't have. Likewise, I hate the ridiculous comparisons of stealing a car to making a copy of something.
The really money wasted in piracy is fighting it. It will never be stopped, and anyone thinking it will is kidding themselves. I've never met someone who hasn't pirated something - even my 85 year old grandparents have had CDs burned and given to them. More digital downloads, ad-delivered content on demand and incentives to purchase may reduce piracy, but DRM and "don't pirate" messages, or ******** like region coding, so that anyone outside USA pays twice as much, really isn't helping.
Ya piracy is wild in Jakarta, indonesia. You can buy any cost related app which is burned onto a cd for about 50 cents, which of course goes to the supplier, not the actual developer through apple..
Theft does not require claiming ownership. It merely requires interference with a property right so as to prevent the owner of that right from exercising it. When you take something from me so that I no longer can enjoy it, obviously you have interfered with ALL of my property rights. But theft does not require that.
For example, your second-hand game example - in the U.S., at least, the author of a game has no property rights to the physical medium containing his work after he sells it. This is called the "First Sale Doctrine." This means that a purchaser can re-sell the game without interfering with the author's rights - the author has no right that can be interfered with.
Same deal with lending a book.
If, however, you were to copy the book you have interfered with the author's statutory right to exclude you from copying. Hence it is theft.
The Tivo case is very interesting. You are making a copy and/or a derivative work in violation of the author's copyright when you use a Tivo. It hasn't been clearly adjudicated yet, but the Fair Use exception almost certainly applies (same deal with videotapes, which WAS adjudicated), so you probably are not interfering with an actual right as long as it's for personal use. When you download the episode via torrent, however, you are clearly making an unauthorized copy, probably without a fair use defense (though if it is a show that is broadcast and which you could have received but didn't, this is another very interesting legal question. The person who uploaded it, however, clearly has no fair use defense).
And, despite your assertion, most people do not pirate anything.
The developer already got their money, they are out of the picture. What is still in the picture is that used game seller.
Most books state they can not be copied besides brief quotes. They do not mention anything about sharing.
You already payed for the service from your provider.
illegal unless you are in another country in which case you are good.
If the group that controls the rights to those products wants you to have them, then they will allow a way for you to obtain them. Otherwise you have no right to that content unless there is some law stating when their ownership expired.
You are right, piracy will never stop but at the same time you can stop it from proliferating. Imagine you could go to a (us) mall and see a pirate store. Where you can buy a jailbroken iphone with cracked apps. Or a cheap copy with the latest windows OS along with office and photoshop. Imagine how many people who never knew about piracy or were too lazy/dumb to hack themselves would buy that.
Most people besides mp3s on limewire have very little experience pirating software. As it stands right now i have only met one person who a hacked xbox (1), 1 person with a wii and no one with a ps2 + modchip. I have met maybe 4 or 5 people who know how to use bittorent and i taught 2 of them. As for jailbroken iphone i have met maybe 9 people with hacked ones v the 10s of people who oem ones.
Ryeno, you took a legal approach at the arguments iEdd brought into the discussion, and from this viewpoint, yes, you are correct. But i guess iEdd wanted to point out that the assumption of losing sales can also happen in other ways, not only due to copyright infringement.
If i borrow a book from a friend or library, read it, and give it back, the author doesn´t make any money from me. If i download an ebook, read it and delete it afterwards, the author gets the same amount of money, none. But in both cases i learned about the author and his books, and i might buy his other books. So, if everyone would just borrow those books out of a library, no author would ever make any individual sales. People still buy books, and people also still buy software, even if there is a certain amount of "piracy".
If you deliver a good product, people will buy it. Just look at the game "Doodle Jump". It suffers the same amount of piracy as any game in the App Store, still it sells incredibly well. The PC Version of "The Sims 3" got leaked early, still EA sold millions of copies.
If i borrow a book from a friend or library, read it, and give it back, the author doesn´t make any money from me. If i download an ebook, read it and delete it afterwards, the author gets the same amount of money, none. But in both cases i learned about the author and his books, and i might buy his other books. So, if everyone would just borrow those books out of a library, no author would ever make any individual sales. People still buy books, and people also still buy software, even if there is a certain amount of "piracy".
If you deliver a good product, people will buy it. Just look at the game "Doodle Jump". It suffers the same amount of piracy as any game in the App Store, still it sells incredibly well. The PC Version of "The Sims 3" got leaked early, still EA sold millions of copies.
This is going to run and run isn't it. Simple matter is that if you are getting something for free that others have to pay for then you know its wrong. If you care or not is another matter
I think people are missing the point. The iTune encoded key was cracked and 1000's of phoney iTune card's and false account were created. I believe an article was written here sometime in 09.
Jail break and downloading mp3's from other soucres, to an Apple iPod/iPhone/iTouch has very little to due with piracy in this story
Jail break and downloading mp3's from other soucres, to an Apple iPod/iPhone/iTouch has very little to due with piracy in this story
The Numbers used in the article are contradictory!
As User Neerazan already pointed out, the numbers in the article don't work out. Let's apply some simple math:
7.5 Million Jailbroken iPhones, 40% of those use pirated software = a total of 3 Million iPhones with at least some pirated Apps installed on them.
510 Million paid applications and a piracy rate of 75% = 1530 Million pirated Apps, as stated in the article.
That means, there should be an average 510(!) pirated applications on each of these iPhones. I dont think that is plausible. The numbers, as a direct result of the article, miss even the biggest possible ballpark.
In my opinion it is the piracy rate figure of 75%, that seeems way off. Even if that is the correct rate for some popular game titles, even if it would be the average rate for games in general it surely cannot be extended to be the average piracy rate over all types of paid applications.
The authors of the article should revise their results. Given the big press attention that this gained (especially through being published on MacRumors) I suggest an [Update] to the main article.
Possible Text:
As User Neerazan already pointed out, the numbers in the article don't work out. Let's apply some simple math:
7.5 Million Jailbroken iPhones, 40% of those use pirated software = a total of 3 Million iPhones with at least some pirated Apps installed on them.
510 Million paid applications and a piracy rate of 75% = 1530 Million pirated Apps, as stated in the article.
That means, there should be an average 510(!) pirated applications on each of these iPhones. I dont think that is plausible. The numbers, as a direct result of the article, miss even the biggest possible ballpark.
In my opinion it is the piracy rate figure of 75%, that seeems way off. Even if that is the correct rate for some popular game titles, even if it would be the average rate for games in general it surely cannot be extended to be the average piracy rate over all types of paid applications.
The authors of the article should revise their results. Given the big press attention that this gained (especially through being published on MacRumors) I suggest an [Update] to the main article.
Possible Text:
Update: Some Readers pointed out, that the numbers in the article lead to a figure of 510 pirated paid apps per device containing pirated material, thereby shedding doubt on the figures and estimates used.
Even accepting your premise, no it doesn't mean that. I've purchased many dozen apps. I only have about a dozen on my phone. See, there's this thing where after you install an app, you can actually remove it.