With the recent mass of updates to Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack and very recently Aperture it has been discovered that Apple has implemented a form of anti-piracy control.
TUAW has posted that the Soundtrack Pro update has not appeared in the Software Update Utility and had to be downloaded manually, upon doing this it was discovered that you have to enter your Apple ID and Serial Number.
Is this a sign of things to come?
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Berkana
22nd December 2005, 08.01 am
Don’t forget history, or be a victim of its repetition: remember that the Amiga platform was killed in part due to the rampant piracy in the Amiga user community. A minority platform cannot risk suffering piracy, and as all corrupt practices, once someone is used to stealing software and justifying the practice to him or herself, they almost never go back to buying. In Asia, the rampant piracy is excused with the ridiculous notion that “if it were cheaper, they’d buy”. How cheap do they want to go? If you can buy a bootleg copy of MS Office for a few bucks with rampant piracy, how can any reasonably priced software ever compete? A sophisticated piece of software is at least as complex to design and implement as a car, and maintaining it is likewise effortful. It is simply unfair for software developers to put up with selling software that is truly worth thousands of dollars for a fraction of that just to ward of the threat of people stealing; if that kind of threat of theft is not tolerated for anything else built with as much testing and effort as software, it should not be tolerated by software developers either.
I, as one who have developed software, applaud this development. The Mac software market must never degenerate into the mess that we see in the PC software market: in the US, there’s a 20-30% rate of piracy, which is orders of magnitude higher than the rates of shoplifting in retail. God forbid people get used to this habit and have the Mac platform become a den of theives. If it means Apple must go to greater extents to do so, so be it; it is a just response to defend developers from theft–which is what piracy is, no matter what people euphemize it as.
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Alex (Proprietor)
22nd December 2005, 12.43 pm
Wow, a very insightful comment. Thanks
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