![]() They've done nothing to assure that they are living up to their half of the copyright bargain they've made with the government, which does so in order to secure benefits to the public at large, not to authors. Could you please clarify it?Īt any rate, I too would have to say that Ambrosia is acting unethically. ![]() but I'm at a loss to understand how you're dragging time-shifting into this one. I do generally agree with you on this issue. Effective antipiracy methods can be done ethically. I will have a concept article ready soon, and I will be working on actually implementing this "in the field" as well, using a shareware application I'm working on as the testbed. ![]() I am almost finished with this, having worked with several people quite active in the warez community in order to make this as ironclad as possible (understanding that no method is truly 100% perfect). When we last discussed this, I said that I would devise a system that managed to combat piracy while still respecting the legitimate rights of legitimate users, unlike your own system. And it likely doesn't even have any real effect over the other methods you use we'll never know for sure, because your system clouds the statistics simply by the way it works (though to be fair, I doubt this was on purpose). This is a serious ethics breach, because it violates several important principles of fair use (most notably time-shifting, but also delving into first-sale, copyright expiration, and presumption of innocence). While your system for this -telephone verification- is less than ideal (not being open 24/7, but this is understandable given Ambrosia's small size), it gets the job done.īut making the codes expire is where you cross the line. And likewise, Internet verification of codes is a Very Good Thing, provided a backup method of verification exists, for people who cannot or don't want to use the Net. I am not arguing that a system of license codes is unecessary clearly it is. In fact, you'd even have gotten a better estimate of how many people are really pirating your software, had you done that. Your expiring codes have done nothing you could simply have Net-verified each code automatically and achieved the same effect. Here's the complete server log from yesterday (with the IP addresses and license codes XXXX'd out to protect the. While our main focus is providing great products and services for our paying customers, things like this can't be ignored. We're a small Macintosh developer software piracy has an impact on our ability to stay in business and keep working on cool new products. In addition, simply because they would never purchase the product does not mean they are entitled to use it in perpetuity as our paying customers do. Granted, it is likely true that many of the people who were attempting to pirate a piece of software will never buy it - but some of them will, if stealing it isn't ridiculously easy. That translates into $2,130 worth of known pirated attempts in a single day. Let's assume the average price for a product is $30. This figure, of course, doesn't count the number of people who were trying to enter a pirated license code, but thought better of contacting our server to attempt to get an updated license code. ![]() Out of those 103 connections, 71 were attempts to use a known pirated license codes (and thus were blocked).Ħ8% of the people attempting to obtain an updated license code yesterday were actually attempting to steal a free copy of one of our products. I'd also like to point out that our server is never contacted surreptitiously - if you enter a license code that is expired, the registration application offers to connect to our server to automatically obtain an updated license code, but only if you click a clearly labeled button.Īccording to our renewal server logs, 103 people connected to it yesterday () to obtain an updated registration code. 30 days or so should be an ample amount of time to enter a license code. It is important to note that license codes don't expire once entered - the only time you'll need to re-enter one of our license codes (and thus may have to obtain an updated code) is when you're installing the product on a new computer, or you've reformatted your hard drive. Details on this license code system can be found in this article: The main reason for doing this was that we saw leaked license codes from just about every product under the sun were distributed in online pirated serial number 'newsletters'. I'm posting this here because there was quite a thread on it a bit ago a retrospective look seems useful.Ī few months ago, we started implementing license codes that would expire if not entered within about 30 days.
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