[INTERESTING ARTICLE; See Page 8] Discussion: Thoughts on Piracy

[Kreekakon]

If a company wishes to stick with a product that they require their employees to know but is too expensive for the average employee, said company should therefore be forced to teach their employees how to use said program, or simply shutdown their company. If there is no legal way for employees to learn the required tools, then the company should either fail (which would therefore hurt, e.g., Adobe as well), or find some other solution to get the job done that is affordable to the average employee, if they choose not to teach their employees for the more expensive products. In either case, a company like Adobe would be forced to bring down their prices or fail along with their clients or fail due to competition.

Yes, companies should do such a thing if they are to keep a talented count of employees. However that wasn't entirely the focus of my point.

Read what my friend said again, and he says, "curious to learn", as opposed to "required to learn". Sometimes people/students just want to get a product, and dissect the whole thing by themselves without any sort of organized class, or instruction. They simply want to prepare themselves for their future, or just have fun. Look at deviantArt, and Newgrounds. Now I have no idea about the actual statistics, but I would say there should be at least a considerable amount of people there who created their work, and learned how to do it with pirated software.

If piracy was completely halted, these people would not be able to create their own artistic work, and Adobe doesn't really need to care, because the majority of these people would be doing it on their free time on their own computers, and would very rarely have a large impact on the actual commercial market. Without piracy, we could be very well denied these works.

Bring piracy into the equation, and the prices will remain high--and may even raise--and competition would be that much less. Companies like Autodesk took a reasonable approach by giving away student licenses for free. This gives them a somewhat safe position in the market place. Other companies don't have to follow suit, but if they wish to stay in business, they'd better have a similar solution to offer to potential employees of their clients. You could argue that piracy helped keep the business in business. But why should we assume that they would not have been able to stay in business without piracy?

Take piracy out of the equation, and the premises lead to better conclusions than what piracy would have lead to.

Yes, if more companies were able to do what Autodesk did with their software, I believe it would've been better for everyone who wanted a learning chance.

I'm pulling this following statement out of thin air just so you know, but I think Adobe may be secretly not considering to follow Autodesk's example because of piracy. If they open up their software, they would have to deal with a considerable amount of "freeloaders", as opposed to people pirating it who are not tied to their company.

^This may seem contradictory to my previous statement up under the first quote, but actually it's not. If piracy is stopped Adobe could still very well STILL not provide a free version of the software, as the main buyers will still be companies, and the official schools that teach it. Most of these facilities will typically buy a whole suite of the software for their computers which are then in turn used by the students/employees. The average consumer never did contribute a substantial amount to their earnings because of the price.

If the consumer believes that a "want" is a "need" though knowing of potential risks, then that is to their own foolishness. It's a digital product; supplies aren't going anywhere. The game company has a market presence, which means there's going to be plenty of information out there to substitute for a demo, since there will be plenty of others that it won't be a risk for. Piracy can be safely left out of the equation. I would find it amazing and absurd that a user is too incompetent to find general information about a game yet somehow manages to obtain a "pirated" copy of the game.

Your statement brings me a bit back to what I said before. I won't deny that information can very well substitute a demo, but I still stand by what I say of first-hand trying out a product to be the most effective at convincing a consumer to buy a product.