Beating the pirates
03 April 2007

"In the 1980's piracy consisted of spotty teenagers swapping computer games. It was all pretty harmless stuff although did eventually help to lead to the demise of the Commodore 64 and Sinclair Spectrum amongst others."

In the mid-1970's, Steve Wozniak woke up one morning and decided that it would be a great idea if he connected a keyboard and a monitor to a central processing unit and got the keystrokes to appear on the screen. Shortly after that, software was born and soon after that software piracy.

In the 1980's piracy consisted of spotty teenagers swapping computer games. It was all pretty harmless stuff although did eventually help to lead to the demise of the Commodore 64 and Sinclair Spectrum amongst others. If FAST (The Federation Against Software Theft) are to be believed thesedays buying software from pirates helps finance organised crime and even terrorism! This is reason enough to try to be squeaky clean, I guess.

Perfectly sane people wouldn't ever consider walking out of Next without paying, clutching armfuls of clothes and waving cheerfully at the checkout assistant as they run down the High Street towards their getaway car. But for some reason they appear perfectly happy to steal software worth several hundred pounds. Of course, the software manufacturers don't help themselves with their bizzare (and some would say morally questionable) pricing strategy. QuarkXPress 7, for example, costs $749 in the States (about £370) but in the UK retails for £749. Even if you take off sales taxes (which in UK are about 10% higher than across the pond) costs are easily 60% higher for us in Britain than for our American cousins.

Pirates use that as an excuse to copy and sell their wares and although I agree with them up to a point (ie. that the price difference is a bad thing) it doesn't condone their blatantly illegal activities. Although I don't know any software pirates, I do know people who benefit from buying their goods either directly or indirectly. "If software was a reasonable price," they say, "we'd happily buy it." However, these same people seem just as happy to steal a £10 piece of shareware as they do a £2,000 professional CAD package so this argument totally dies on its feet. If they really believed all that stuff they'd cough up some cash occassionally.

OK, so I'm not going to try to take the moral high ground here as I have been far from blameless in this respect over the years. But being someone who writes plenty of code in one form or another (mainly web, but also stand alone) I know just how much effort goes into the whole development process. And someone pinching your work isn't a nice feeling at all.

It's for this reason that I'm making myself 100% hardware and software legal. There's a decent offer at the moment for Adobe Creative Suite. If you buy the current version (CS2.3) then you qualify for a free upgrade to the new version (CS3) that starts shipping later this month. The bottom line here is that with this offer it's possible to save a whopping £700 on Creative Suite Design Premium CS3 which is not to be sneezed at. This is what I've gone for and it will eventually give me InDesign CS3, Photoshop CS3 Extended and Dreamweaver CS3 - packages I need for my web design business. As a bonus, I'll also have Flash CS3, Acrobat Pro, Illustrator CS3 and a number of bundled apps including Adobe Bridge.

It's a shame that I'm even writing this blog entry; a shame that me announcing that I'm 100% software legal should, somehow, be an event; an exception rather than the rule. Thinking about it, I can think of very few people I know who are similarly placed. There are some, I'm glad to say, but plenty of others who would happily steal from their own mother given half a chance... or maybe not and I guess that's the crux of the matter: these people wouldn't (and don't) steal anything else apart from software - so why do it? Perhaps the whole point here is that the checkout assistant isn't watching them run down the High Street. They can be totally open about what they do and put the bag with SWAG written on it in the draw for another time.

Anyway, I've said my piece and I hope Steve Wozniak would be impressed at my stance even if no-one else is.