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Software Piracy is Everyone's Responsibility
by Patrick Meader

June 2003 Issue

Patrick Meader Editor in Chief

What kinds of trade-offs are you willing to make to stem software piracy? Tell me at or discuss this in the Talk to the Editors of Visual Studio Magazine forum on our Web site. Use this Locator+ code: VS0306EN_D

As someone who works in publishing, I'm sensitive to the importance of intellectual copyrights and protecting work from piracy.

Piracy costs content providers of all stripes significant sums of money, including the vendors who create tools for Visual Studio .NET. How much it costs is widely disputed, but a study sponsored by the Business Software Alliance (BSA, www.bsa.org/usa) estimates that software piracy cost retailers of business software $1.8 billion in 2001 in the U.S. alone. The BSA has its own agenda, and I'm skeptical about its specific numbers, but I sympathize with those who want to protect their intellectual property.

That said, I hate most forms of copy protection because of the inconvenience imposed. Whether it's an e-book reader that won't permit you to use text-to-speech when reading purchased books or CDs that require you to have them handy to use the software, many of the cures strike me as worse than the disease, imposing burdens on the content consumers while doing little to stem content theft.

In an interview last year with Dean Guida, CEO and president at Infragistics, I asked him whether stopping the use of casual software piracy was worth instituting Windows Product Activation (WPA) in his company's products, given the accompanying hassles for his customers. Dean replied that Infragistics was about to abandon WPA in favor of another licensing plan [Eds: it did], but also said something telling about why WPA was instituted in the first place:

"We've had people go up to our Web server, buy a copy of a product, and within minutes or hours, buy three more copies. At the same time, I've had people tell us they need 10 copies of our Java software, then call back later and tell us that they only needed one copy."

The conclusion is obvious: Many companies were buying a single copy of the software and installing it across multiple machines—exactly what WPA is intended to protect against.

I'm glad Infragistics opted for another approach, but I don't begrudge the company for adopting WPA in the first place. Other approaches aren't as well thought out. For example, a vendor new to the Visual Studio market doesn't let you download trial copies of its .NET components. Yes, such copies are often pirated with stolen codes and that costs the vendor sales. But many companies purchase software only after experimenting with trial downloads first. In our focus groups, downloading and trying out components is frequently the final consideration before purchasing a component. Customers expect to be able to try before they buy, and the inability to try out a given product will keep many customers from considering such a product. In this case, the copy protections aren't making the product more difficult to use; they are thwarting any consideration of using the company's products in the first place.

Piracy isn't just a publisher issue. Napster, as cool as the idea could have been, indicated the extent to which everyday folks are willing to trade copyrighted materials and abuse fair-use doctrines, and there is no question that some companies abuse single-seat licenses to the point of absurdity. A good legislative solution, one that balances the interests of content providers and content consumers, would be welcome. (The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is not that bill because it's tilted entirely toward content producers and provides little in the way of consumer protections. But that's a subject worthy of its own Editor's Note.)

In the meantime, there is a two-fold responsibility. First, content publishers need to weigh the convenience of their customers against potential losses from making their products less easy or less enjoyable to use. Second, content consumers must use the software they purchase responsibly. Purchasing one copy of a product, then using it everywhere throughout the enterprise is enormously unfair to the content provider and could have a significant impact on the quality of the product in the future (the income generated by a product affects the resources a company will devote to improving it)—or even whether a company will update the product at all. If customers won't use the software responsibly, content providers will continue to attempt to build in controls that make both using and creating the software more onerous.