Some thoughts on the 'criminal' act of software piracy

Something I posted earlier as a comment on SVN

I am 22 years old. When I was around 14, computers became more than something we used in school to do book reports and HyperCard presentations… they became a source of entertainment, a way of connecting to my friends and the world.

Now, when you’re 14 years old, you don’t have much money, and even less morals as far as ‘free’ items go. I was the at the right (or wrong) age at precicely the same moment in time when applications and software and games could be copied and traded with relative ease… If one of my friends’ parents bought them ‘X-Wing,’ for example… what was the harm in simply making a copy of all (17) installation disks for me? Theft? We were just 14-year olds with no money trading some software, we weren’t criminals.

We strived to belong to the ‘3l33t3’ (elite) BBSs, so that we could get software (over a blazing fast 14.4 connection) that no one we knew in person had purchased. Again, we didn’t see ourselves as pirates, we saw the act of acquiring bootlegged software as just as much fun (if not more) than actually using the software itself… Using arcane keyboard commands… knowing passwords… getting the right number to dial.

So, all the way up through high school and college, I simply continued this practice, again due to the lack of money. I didn’t use software for ‘commercial’ purposes… I just wanted some decent software experience before I got to college, so I took Photoshop 3 from my high school. When I got to college, I still wasn’t making money, and having software at home was more convenient than always using (virus-infected and slow) school computers. So I went from not spending $50 for games to not spending $600 for professional software packages; from scanning WWIV BBSs to scanning Hotline. Music? Hell yeah, once that came around as downloadable, instead of copying CDs to tape, I just Napstered up a few tunes.

Victimless crime? Not exactly, but as victimless as you can get, perhaps… Oh, poor multi-billion dollar Adobe didn’t get the $600 for the version of Photoshop I’m running at home. Aw, too bad. Now, I did buy MacOS X 10.0, because I happen to feel that the mass success of that software will determine Apple’s future and longevity, a company I probably care a little too much about… The only companies hurt by software piracy are companies like Panic, who independently create useful, wonderful software that no one else has the balls to make. After using a ‘distributed’ Audion serial number for a while, when version 2.0 came out, I bought my own copy of it. Did I ‘distribute’ that serial number to a few friends of mine? Sure I did. Did I feel bad about it? Not really. It was mine to give, at that point, or at least that’s the way it felt.

Maybe I’m wrong. I probably am. But to someone like me who’s been doing this for a long time and seen no consequences, it’s hard to prove to me that piracy and Napster are all that big a deal.

• Category: Macintosh, Music