MOFO Pro said:
If everyone who had Waves installed on their PC actually paid for it... they could make the same profit selling it for $9.99... Ever think of that??
If they had sold it for $9.99 in the first place, nobody would steal it. Ever think about that?
But seriously, the reason they charge so much is to make it seem more "exclusive". In essence, they charge an exorbitant price to make their software seem more important and professional. The result is a much higher piracy rate among non-professionals, but they made that choice with full knowledge that they were pricing it out of the range of non-professionals. They didn't care about those sales enough to charge a reasonable price, so they don't deserve those sales.
Ideally, though, they should lose those sales to a competitor, not to piracy. By supporting their more reasonably-priced competition, you're adding money into their R&D, which will eventually make them a more viable competitor to sleazy operations like Waves. Eventually, this will mean that Waves won't be able to screw people, and that would be a real improvement for everyone.
That said, you have to be somewhat disingenuous to claim that piracy is lost revenue. The reality is that it gets people locked into the software, and then later, when they have the money to pay for it, they generally do. By contrast, if they didn't have access to the cracked versions, they probably would not have ended up buying it in the end.
In fact, piracy, at least when viewed over the long haul, actually
increases sales of software, provided you ignore throwaway software like games. There have been numerous studies to show that piracy also increases sales of music, and that putting the text of books online increases book sales. Of course, the industry (a few rare gems like
Baen Books notwithstanding) will never admit that there's any validity to those studies, and will keep spouting their distorted "lost sales" figures, but it's pretty much a load of BS.
Case in point: nearly a quarter of all Windows installs are pirated. Guess why Windows is the most popular OS on the planet. Guess how Microsoft killed OS/2 and other competition. One of the key ingredients was that Windows was pirated at a higher rate. It has been repeatedly noted that if pirated Windows had not been available in developing countries, they would have ended up using something like Linux or OS/2, and Windows' control over the market would have been significantly weakened. Thus, in effect, they have benefitted greatly from broad piracy.
Most popular software for music composition: Finale. Guess how highly that is pirated. But most of those pirated copies are among students who then end up teaching music, and ta-da, their school buys a copy of the software. In fact, many of the more intelligent companies in that space (NOT the manufacturer of Finale) have actually started giving away 90-day or 1-year licenses of their software for music students for precisely this reason. They realized that the children are our future, so to speak....
I'm not saying piracy is justified among professionals. It isn't. But don't be fooled into thinking these companies don't know that piracy increases their sales. IMHO, most companies add things like iLok to stop piracy because they know that piracy has already built up their installed base and that if they can make it suddenly hard to pirate their software, all of those locked-in users will be forced to buy it because it would be too hard to change to someone else's software.
If only all those blacklisted hollywood communist sympathizers had been successful in brainwashing the nation in the 50's through TV, we wouldn't have to put up with capitolism...... right velvet elvis?
The rest of his life, really?