Nate Anderson’s article Do copy protection firms encourage piracy? led me to this statement about copy protection from games and utility software manufacturer Stardock Systems. Dig this excerpt:
We’ve been around a long time — 14 years now. Our software gets pirated. We don’t like it but piracy is a fact of life. And not every pirated copy means a lost sale.
The question isn’t about eliminating piracy, it’s about increasing sales. It’s about trying to make sure that people who would buy your product buy it instead of steal it.
Our primary weapon to fight piracy is through rewarding customers through convenient, frequent, free updates.
If you make it easy for users to buy and make full use of your product or service legitimately then we believe that you’ll gain more users from that convenience than you’ll lose from piracy.
One of the first case studies I wrote when I started this job was about how ATI used Stardock software to customize the control panel interface for its graphics card. I thought that Stardock was a pretty cool company then. Now, I’m downright proud to have worked with them. Hooray for Stardock.
Tags: DRM, copy protection, piracy, Stardock
Wade Rockett 