Xatren posted at 6:13PM Fri, 27 November 2015 - #4241252

AmbientShade posted at 5:52PM Fri, 27 November 2015 - #4241245

"I was never going to buy that Mercedes, because I can't afford one. But hey, here's one with the keys in it, I'll just take this one. They aren't losing any money because I was never going to be a customer to begin with".

Look, I don't support piracy either, but you know this is a strawman. The car in this example is a tangiable good, and ownership of it is like a zero sum game. When one person steals it, the other person loses it, or has one less to sell to someone that could have afforded it. It's not that way with software and content. Simply saying that it doesn't matter whether it's tangible or not doesn't make that so. The only time an intangible product producer loses money to piracy is when the pirate represented actual demand in the economic sense.

Personally, I purchase all of my software and content legally, because I remember the look on my dad's face the one time I stole something when I was a kid. Moral inclinations, however, don't have any bearing on the economic impact of piracy. It either has an effect or it does not, regardless of how we feel about it, and it is the economic impact that determines whether or not there is a victim in the act. For someone to be wronged economically, they have to suffer economic injury or loss of some kind. If the person that pirates a thing could never have bought it anyway (not would never, but could never), there is no sense in which the creator or seller of that thing suffered a loss or injury by that act of piracy. On the other hand, I have the money to purchase commercial copies of things, and therefore it would not be a victimless theft if I pirated something. I represent actual demand, and me opting for a pirated copy instead of a commercial copy represents real loss to the seller or creator.

Now, the providing of the pirated version for others to download is an entirely different story, and not at all what I am talking about here.

EDIT: Back on topic, the DRM in this case doesn't seem that incredibly onerous to me. Other poser users seem to disagree, judging from the backlash over the de-activations in Game Dev, though. That being the case, it seems a boneheaded move (to me) for a company with arguably trailing market share at this point and considerable losses on the books to risk a repeat of that series of events by including what is essentially the same DRM system again.

For my part, I am just going to stick with Pro 2012 (I got a great deal after all ) until such time as the promised infrastructure for dealing with the activation process is in place, and make a decision about upgrading to Pro 11 then.