Wired dives into App Store piracy

colourflight you are so very wrong. It is theft plain and simple. Why is not theft, because you are stealing something not tangible? If an architect works for months on plans and drawings for a house and you take his files and use them without paying, is this not stealing? You bet it is, and it is the same thing with apps.

Perhaps Apple doesn't mind people stealing apps. Think about this, what would happen if people cracked iTunes and started downloading all the songs for free? My guess is security updates would immediately be issued and lawsuits would start flying.

However app piracy creates buzz and excitement which drives iPhone sales. Most apps are made by independent developers. Not big record companies which can defend themselves. And carriers don't care. They don't get a share of app sales, and piracy might increase data usage which benefits them.

You can tell yourself it's "theft" all you want, but it's really, really not. Neither in any sensible person's eyes nor in the eyes of the law.

Stealing someone's car is a LOT different than pirating their app.

Your description of BSA's software piracy estimates as "insane" is a bit exaggerated itself. While you're right that not every piece of pirated software would be replaced with licensed software if all illegal sources were shut down, the IDC estimates are still a reliable way of estimating the scale of piracy, which is more than a third of all software installed worldwide. Imagine the problems we'd have if a third of all autos on the streets were stolen.

The total losses to society are actually higher than what IDC estimates due to ripple effects such as fewer jobs in IT services, lower tax revenues to support needed government services, and the costs of cyber security incidents from using malware-infected or poorly maintained software. For example, according to Information Week, the Conficker virus has spread the most in countries with high piracy rates.

The issue is one of respect. Smart phones are popular, and smart phone apps are the new target for pirates. Like most other software, that software is generally sold via license, and people need to simply respect that license. If they think the small price to pay is too much, then they should find a suitable alternative, not rip off software developers.

You wrote:

"a 100-1 pirate-pay ratio -- dramatic, but not necessarily catastrophic."

If you mean that for every 1 paid copy, there are 100 pirated copies, I'd say that's more than catastropic.

However, I suspect you really meant that for every 100 paid copies, there's 1 pirated copy -- except that's not what you *wrote*. :-) You need to flip the words "pirate" and "pay," so they properly correspond to the ratio, like so:

"a 100-1 pay-pirate ratio."

By doing so, your statement will make sense. :-)

But more to the point, isn't TechVi the best show in the history of television ever? =)

Thanks for posting the conversation this morning, I thought it went well.

Is piracy more common on the iPhone than on PCs? Do we want Apple to lock down our personal computers to prevent piracy there? Or is the interest in this issue just more iPhone over-excitement?

I love it. Once again TUAW advocates software piracy:

“I take issue with Chen's citation of a 2008 Business Software Alliance study that claimed that the economic impact of software piracy is in the tens of billions of dollars each year. While software piracy undoubtedly has an economic impact, the figures that the BSA claims are just insane. Each pirated copy of a piece of software does not necessarily equal a lost sale and while software piracy, in any form, is certainly bad for the overall software ecosystem, distorting the truth doesn't help the situation.”

The BSA’s numbers may be crap, but that doesn't change the fact that pirating software is theft, just as stealing a car is theft. Distorting that truth certainly doesn't help the situation.

What's shocking is the level of "cheapness" of some people. Granted for what you get some of the apps cost too much; however, aside from a handful of insanely expensive apps, most are just a few dollars. One could just buy an app for the price of a coffee, or lunch.

The only thing I don't like is that there is no option to try-before-you-buy. Nor is there an easy refund system. There are some applications I would like to try before I invest but the screenshots or description don't make it clear if the application would really fit what I'm looking for. Perhaps this is why people are using pirated copies??

I'm surprised Apple hasn't released a patch to fix some of the vulnerabilities the cracks are exploiting. One is a simple plist edit which would be very easy to fix.

Piracy exists the way it does because every single app for the iPhone and iPod touch used to be completely free. Well almost; there was an app that hid videos and apps that asked for a key. But 99.9% of it was free. With the introduction of the Appstore however, pricing started existing. There were many apps from Installer and Cydia that were freely given then, but started selling with a price on the Appstore. One example is iPhysics. iPhysics was an excellent game that dealt with gravity, shapes, and whatnot. When the Appstore came out, the developer made a "lite" edition of it for $1.99. You couldn't download more levels with the lite edition and some features were removed. He never even bothered making the hypothesized full edition that he planned to sell for $9.99. Another example is a very simple multi-player hockey board game offered on Installer. It popped up on the Appstore for $0.99.

People, such as myself, have always been used to freely given games, and many refuse to adapt to pricing. Especially in this economy. That's why piracy exists.

Sorry if I made any mistakes typing this...I'm too lazy to autocorrect. :)