A Word about Software Piracy

(Yeah, the above video is a bit on the lame side, even if it is now considered a classic of sorts. I’m surprised I wasn’t forced to watch it when I was in school. Nonetheless, even though we’ve gone to different software distribution media than floppy disks, many of the points on the video are still valid.)

Software piracy, no matter how you slice it, is simply not acceptable in the creative fields. Think about it: you’re pouring your heart and soul, not to mention brainpower, mind space and creative energy into the video you create. You want to be compensated for it. Since you do get compensation, you should be appropriately licensing your software.

Over the years, we’ve been witness to many things:

• Microsoft Windows XP (and all versions of Windows since) require product activation to function. This has been somewhat controversial, since your computer often “phones home” to the software developer to prove that their configuration hasn’t changed, or to prove that another copy of the software isn’t running somewhere else.
• Avid and Canopus have been notorious for using dongles (hardware keys) to make their software function. If you lost your dongle, you could call tech support and all they would do is say, “Aww, too bad. Sorry to hear that. You can buy a new one for (insert obscene amount of money here.)” Recently, Avid has dropped the dongle requirement, instead going to product activation. (However, this also had the interesting side effect of making internal USB ports and locking computer cases very prominent line items on many workstation spec sheets.)
• Many games require that you insert the original media that you installed the product from in order to launch the program.
• Back in the stone age, some games had you type in a word from the owner’s manual to launch the program.
• Some programs that were distributed on floppy had a unique way of doing things. You could install the program onto one hard drive–and when the install was finished, the installer would write to a file on the floppy to disable the installer. So you could use the software from the floppy, but you couldn’t install it again. (Hope your hard drive doesn’t crash.)

The pirates came up with many ways to break the copy protection measures. Among other methods were key generators, cracks, workarounds involving ISO images, etc. Generally all of these methods are a huge pain, and also expose your computer (and all of the data on it) to some really nasty things, including viruses and malware of all types.

Can you really get something for nothing? Well, maybe. But it’s not worth the bother or the risk. It’s also unethical and dishonest.