mjp
Founding member
Piracy (wait, what is this, the RIAA?) shouldn't be a concern. Digital media is always going to be stolen. But the fact is, the vast majority of the people who "steal" your digital media weren't going to buy it anyway, so it's kind of a moot point. Millions of people use Photoshop, for example, but only a few hundred thousand of them actually pay for it. If you made it impossible to steal Photoshop, the people who use black market copies would just move along to something else they could get for free. They would not get out their credit cards and pay Adobe $800 or whatever the hell Photoshop costs these days.
My first job on the internet was doing support for a guy who wrote a few different programs, the most popular of which was an html generator. He made the registration process so difficult and problematic that he ran his own paying customers away (and put me out of a job), rather than just forget about the cracked copies of his software floating around. I tried to reason with him that those knuckleheads weren't going to buy the shit if they couldn't use it for free, but he didn't accept that. And his company died.
And if you think "illegal" MP3s are killing the recording industry, think again. They make boatloads of money from legit download sales, more than enough to offset the all-but-dead CD market. They still go to maniacal and psychotic extremes to track down illegal downloads, and those kinds of actions are going to eventually kill them, just like they killed the html program company I worked for back in 94 and 95. You can't have a hostile, combative relationship with the public for long and still expect to sell shit to them.
As for someone taking credit for your work, who cares. So some knob on some obscure web site that only 10 people are ever going to see says he wrote your story. Big deal.
My first job on the internet was doing support for a guy who wrote a few different programs, the most popular of which was an html generator. He made the registration process so difficult and problematic that he ran his own paying customers away (and put me out of a job), rather than just forget about the cracked copies of his software floating around. I tried to reason with him that those knuckleheads weren't going to buy the shit if they couldn't use it for free, but he didn't accept that. And his company died.
And if you think "illegal" MP3s are killing the recording industry, think again. They make boatloads of money from legit download sales, more than enough to offset the all-but-dead CD market. They still go to maniacal and psychotic extremes to track down illegal downloads, and those kinds of actions are going to eventually kill them, just like they killed the html program company I worked for back in 94 and 95. You can't have a hostile, combative relationship with the public for long and still expect to sell shit to them.
As for someone taking credit for your work, who cares. So some knob on some obscure web site that only 10 people are ever going to see says he wrote your story. Big deal.