Some other things Surprise Guest didn't take into account:Alex Reynolds wrote:Nope, totally incorrect. Plainly speaking, how does a vendor come up with the $400 number to begin with?Surprise Guest wrote:I'm not in favor of cracked stuff, but your reasoning on economics is flawed big-time. Let's say total Direct Cost of Goods sold for Ableton for a given year is 2 million (dollars, euros, whatever).. Let's say Ableton sells 7,500 licensed units at $400 per unit in that same year which equates to 4 million (dollars, euros, whatever). That gives a contribution margin of 2 million leftover to cover overhead, operating profit, etc.Alex Reynolds wrote: Obviously you've never had to work for a living. Someone get this guy a Parasite of the Year award.
Okay dumbasses, here's how things work in the Real World:
The more copies of a digital product you steal, the more that honest people pay to recoup the research, development and production costs. So, yes, you are depriving others of what you are stealing.
Now, it doesn't matter if 5, 1000, 75000 or 500000 software pirates get their hands on a cracked version.....the economics of the vendor remain unchanged. You could argue that it's lost revenue, but it certainly doesn't cause the honest people to pay more.
Vendors have to price their products taking into account that a certain percentage of people will be dishonest, in order to anticipate for lost revenue.
Higher prices only affect honest people, not thieves.
Rationalize it however you like, color the issue with layers of grey that aren't there, but at the end of the day, when you steal -- whatever you steal -- you end up making things more expensive for the rest of us. You make it harder for creative people to get paid for their efforts.
Basically you make life harder for everyone, however you try to justify it.
To those who use stolen goods: You might decide you don't care that you make things more difficult for honest people, or that you steal from people creating original, novel things.
But invoking George II's name to try to justify theft is about the most ridiculous thing you can do and will make you come across as a greasy asshole.
1. A software developer has to decide to determine how much time and work to put into his antipiracy scheme. That costs money and yields zero profit. He has to balance the scheme against the pain factor (i.e., some people love iLok but it horrifies me)
2. The developer also has to pick a price point which does not tempt partially honest people to steal it; i.e., if Live was USD1000, it would be awful hard for me to get; although I'd try to work without it, there is really no direct competition for it. If the price is too low you may sell more units but you will make too little money to stay in business.
3. SG was assuming Ableton was selling 7500 copies a year at USD400 each. First of all Live sells for about USD300, and most copies are sold by other distributors, and Ableton's share of the profit is small maybe 10 - 15%. With less than 4000 registered users in this forum totally I don't expect they are selling 7500/year. (Also, some users upgrade and some don't, etc.)
Overall, it's a bad idea. However everything has exceptions:
1. When Gibson bought Opcode and put them out of business, if you needed support or to repair an authorization on your legal copy of Studio Vision, you were screwed. At that point I found a krack and used it. Floppy disks don't last forever...
2. If you use some kracked software you got and really love it, you should really pay for a legal copy as soon as you can afford it. I haven't done this but since most companies' demos really show you what the stuff can do pretty well...
Those are my opinions, YMMV.
