Piracy can't be stopped by bashing it head-on. Piracy can't be stopped by copy protection schemes. We've seen it all happen. Piracy probably can't be completely eliminated. But it can be reduced to a very low level. The best way to do so has been demonstrated by Borland many years ago. Turbo Pascal was a good programming environment, and it was CHEAP! Photocopying the manuals and copying the diskettes was only slightly (around $10) cheaper than buying the legitimate software. For only $10 extra a Turbo Pascal user wouldn't have to spend hours at the copying machine. He would get support too. No wonder there were (almost) no copied versions of Turbo Pascal around. Borland sold hundreds of thousands of copies. That's the way to go. Affordable legitimate software, with good manuals. I'm a teacher, I teach hardware, operating systems, networking at a polytechnical in the Netherlands. Dutch students aren't rich. They cannot afford $200 for an operating system. But as students they can buy legitimate copies of MS, Corel, Macromedia software at greatly reduced prices. $20 for Windows, $30 for the complete Corel suite, and so on. As soon as they hear from this opportunity, they buy the legitimate software. Point in case: many people would love to work with the legitimate software. But for many people the legitimate software is just too expensive. Lower prices to an acceptable level and software piracy will be reduced to a minor irritation.

The pen is mightier than the sword. But if you literally want to have some impact, use a typewriter

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