Ernst Nathorst-Boos, een van de oprichters van de propellerheads, zegt hierover heel wijs:
Copy Wrongs
A big issue for any software house these days is software piracy. Companies come up with various ways of combating it, Propellerhead's being one of the least intrusive to the legitimate user. How big a problem is piracy for them? Niels: "It's hard to quantify. It's big, of course. But we're very pleased that so many people choose to do the right thing. We try also, rather than introducing copy protection that frustrates users and yet is instantly crackable, to make service and support easy for the people who have done the right thing and bought the program. We don't want to frustrate them with installation processes that are more convoluted than downloading a pirate version, if you know what I mean. It's almost a punishment with some software products to actually buy them. We really want our users to have an easy life. We try instead to add value to the process of registration. We have a very good registration database, and for our registered users we hope we will make our service much better.
"It's also about having the material that's included with the program. People will want the sounds. We have the Soundbank, that's 500MB, and the new version has the Orkester [24-bit orchestral samples] collection for the NNXT sampler. The sheer size of that will prevent some downloads. We get the occasional post on the board that says: "Oh, I've lost my Soundbank CD, can anyone do me a copy?" I usually write 'Official reply from Propellerhead: Just register your software, and we'll sort you out.' Of course, you never hear back. We can also check, based on the songs that are being posted, whether they've been made using a pirate copy. On our archive, there are no songs made with pirated programs."
"No one really knows what the software issue is all about", adds Ernst. "I can illustrate with a story. I have three children; the oldest is 16. When Napster arrived, he started downloading songs like crazy. And he got to find out about so many new bands that he never heard about, which also meant that he started buying CDs like a lunatic. Then Napster disappeared, and he stopped buying as many records as he used to, because where is his source now? There's the radio, but he's not interested in the music that's played in the radio. And MTV? No! I'm saying that I can understand what the record industry is saying, but I can also show examples of the opposite. I think it's the same thing with software piracy. It is a major problem for us, but no one actually knows the mechanisms behind it. No one knows how many of these people bought the program who wouldn't actually have been your customers otherwise."
(komt uit de SOS van deze maand overigens)
Olaf