Inert Detritus The Internet's dust bunnies

Piracy and Development

From ArsTech­ni­ca: Infi­nite Loop: Inter­view: Wil Ship­ley of Deli­cious Mon­ster:

…Pira­cy: who cares if some­one steals your appli­ca­tion if they were nev­er going to buy it in the first place?

Cabel spoke briefly about pira­cy at C4[1]. Pan­ic has long black­list­ed pirat­ed ser­i­al num­bers in updates to Audion, Trans­mit, and the like. But for the first time, they inte­grat­ed live black­list check­ing in Coda, where, instead of an appli­ca­tion update to refresh the seri­als black­list, Coda pulls a live copy of the list from Pan­ic’s servers. Cabel said that any­thing above and beyond basic check­sum­ming and black­list­ing is too much work to pre­vent too lit­tle pira­cy, and for users deter­mined not to pay for soft­ware, a devel­op­er try­ing to thwart them is com­pet­ing in a los­ing game, com­pet­ing against some­one with infi­nite time and ener­gy to devote to break­ing the hur­dles placed in front of them.

And hence, Wil’s obvi­ous con­clu­sion: if they steal it, you can’t count it as a lost sale: they prob­a­bly nev­er had any inten­tion of buy­ing it.