Dan Mayer

Differences in Stealing Intellectual Property

In response to the recent Colorado Daily article entitled, “Hey... why pay for your software?”

If you haven't read the above article please read that first. Also this was simplified a bit to make it easier to understand for the not tech community.

In the software piracy article Phil Weiser, a CU associate professor of law was quoted, “If it's wrong to take a compact disc from a record store without paying for it, then it's wrong to take the exact same value in digital form.” The idea that digital and physical objects are the same isn't true. My primary problem with theft is that in the end someone, spent money to provide a product for you to purchase. If you steal that product not only do they not profit they also lost money creating that product. Downloading software from the Internet doesn't have the effect of any lost money. There is no cost per product, only to originally create the software. There is no cost lost for shipping, stocking stores, or paying store clerks to sell the product. Companies that have the most software stolen would be producing the same software for the many people and companies that do buy it. These companies are already producing large profits and wouldn't ever stop producing the software because it is stolen. Therefore, there is no money actually lost by the company when that software is stolen. Most of the people stealing software would have no intention of ever purchasing it.

In the article Weiser contends that, “the 'Saving money' argument is not persuasive because, like pirated software 'downloaders,' the people who can afford to buy music are generally those who illegally download songs.” Most people that steal software in fact could not afford most of the software. Music is very cheap in comparison, typically a few songs are downloaded instead of paying the purchasing price of the CD. This is roughly spending $15 on the CD, which most people can afford. Now take commonly stolen software: MS Office $400, Adobe Photoshop $649, Adobe Premiere $699. If you steal a few common applications you can quickly have a software library worth over $2000. Most people I know can't afford this. Since the people stealing the software couldn't afford the software, they wouldn't have ever purchased it. Since they would have never purchased the software, there is no monetary loss to the company by losing a paying costumer.

Besides the differences mentioned above, stealing intellectual property has other differences to physical property as well. We can take the example of cars, since the article compares the two, “It's (intellectual property) a product of theirs in the same way cars are a product of GM.” There are different companies that make cars which provides a competitive market for pricing. With intellectual property a competitive market doesn't exist. For example a business student in today’s society is expected to have experience with MS Office. Having experience with a similar product on a resume isn't acceptable. This can't be blamed on other companies not producing competitive software, because these companies can't make truly competitive software. The difference lies in laws for intellectual property, for a car to function as any other car would it only has to be able to drive on a road. For software the equivalent would be to work with a file format. Since the actual file format is part of the intellectual property, other software can't work directly with that format. So how can any company produce a completely competitive product when intellectual property laws prevent them from doing so (Open Office and Corel Office both use various tricks to work around this). This leads to highly dominating software that becomes a needed skill for anyone interested in working with common companies, which rely on the dominating software. This lack of possible competitive products allows for highly overpriced software to remain the only choice.

If stealing software doesn't cost the producing company anything, is it stealing? Software companies mostly gain from this type of theft of software, which is primarily done to learn the software. This creates another paying costumer when they have a job, and further ensures the continuing dominance over any software attempting to be competitive. There are many reasons I could argue in favor of stealing software, but that is a different topic that is out of the scope of this paper. Stealing software is the only way to educate yourself to all the software which you should begin learning for your future. A future that will help ensure a continuing dominance and a continuing cycle of software piracy.