It's a catch 22... at the beginning the small developer should be happy that people are pirating his/hers stuff, as if it is really better than the competition it will spread like wildfire and people will start using its paid versions. Soon the company will grow and will realize that it cannot get a much larger userbase so as the pretense to growth it will try to "kill" the piracy and increase revenue, as well the "piracy benefit" is long gone and the only way forward is to make everyone pay for the service it offers.
It could be argued that MSFT is in the position it's in today beacuse their early software (well even current) was very easy to get hold of, and thus contributed to "mass awareness" which was one of the factors that resulted in the products being present everywhere. Piracy certeanly helped when they were the underdogs in "office" type products...
Anyhow so there are pluses and minuses. IMO (for kiler
) I think that "private use" should be allowed, and the use where the software is making money for the user should be charged. Ie so for business and similar purposes the users would have to pay, and for private/educational it should be free. Of course that publishers shold be free to put up draconian copy protection schemes too, but I'd say none of that "huge fines for copying" stuff should be implemented as even though the publisher would want to charge for everything he produces, the public should as well have to have the "right" to test/try/learn at their discretion as long as they are not making money off the product. Thus if someone is sharing for free = no harm done.
That would get us rid of the artificial "struggle" and would work very well to increase the spread of knowledge. Ulitmately when the 3DMax pirate gets a job, he will be an expert and will pay for the licence of the product that will be making him money, quite simple really. No need for him to "not pay" and risk the cops coming after him when he is making a lot more $ than the product licence costs. So ownership becomes a very good proposition. Otherwise only students who are rich (or very keen to fight for lab spots at the Uni) will get the ability to learn more about the product/discipline that interests them. So in a way the fact that the poster above was able to pirate at the time was good for the company producing software, even though it is currently recognized as an "illegal action". In that situation if you had two companies with similar competitive producst both costink $1000 per licence, with one easy to pirate and the other one not. It is odds on that the "easy to pirate" would kill the "hard to pirate" one over the course of 5-10 years just due to it being accessible to people with no money and creating experts at no cost who will later on use the expertize to create value, and finally buy the products they used in the "learning phase" for free, as the money will not be an issue anymore.
The only products that should have a problem with this is "entertainment" value solution as their ultimate solution is not to make money, but to provide "fun", and again IMO there should be a limit on the legal system proscution as it is just the matter of price. For a person who is employed and OK with $ 40$ for a game is not too bad, perhaps if the games price fell to $20 a pop the sales thus revenue would be even higher, but the current state of the games industry is quite rigid and the games that attempt to lure users this way are very rare, it is not even expected to happen.
On the other hand having no persecution for copying, content distribution systems like "Steam" would get much higher and faster adoptability, and the publishers would still be free to enforce/price their products the way they see fit. The restriction of market through artificial (legal) means just slows down development, and lets old way of thinking survive much longer. In the former case (ie no legal threat) the old style publishers would be much faster to get on the "content distribution system" bandwagon or dissapear, and freedom on one side would result in good product on the other - ie workable alternative to protect the products would have been devised and adopted much faster.
This way the current developers cannot break with old style publishers really fast, there is no "true" incentive to switch when you can make it, and the change will happen, but it will be much slower as opposed to situation without "legal threat". Overall - private use = good; business use = money to developers. In the middle, the developers protecting their products the way they see fit. Just to point out, short of putting abusers to jail, current system just creates animosty between real paying users and the deveopers, as fairly often ripped games have actually higher reliability since the dubious copy protection schemes are actually making a good product unstable (see Starforce, or SafeDisk4).
In the end if this "suing action" would have been abandoned, the end solutions, which will happen anyhow in 5-10 years, would have just come sooner, as it stands, no client only based protection will work, and only systems where you will have to log on to the developer/publisher server to be able to use the product will have a chance of succeeding,
but such a solution bypasses the legal system completely again, if anything this legal struggle vs private consumers is just a diversion which slows the change and adoptation of new content distribution systems, while creating the "enemy" feeling between us the paying customers and the product creators. (perhaps not the creators/developers so much, but the current publishers who have the most to lose, as their very existance in current shape is threathened, and will eventually be eliminated).
* ok so this was a short essay on the current state of privacy and piracy
