"Wow Amit !", said Rahul, "You got that latest Need for Speed game ! Please lend it to me for a day. I'll just copy it and return it to you immediately."
"No Problem Mate, but dont forget to lend me your FIFA 2005 CDs. I hope the crack file is included in it.", said Amit.
"Of course it is.", muttered Rahul.
Amit gave a wide smile and said,"Ok boss, it's a deal then !"
This is the present scenario. With more and more people discovering their worlds in the cyberspace, these 'deals' and spreading exponentially. After all, who would bother to spend 2000 silly bucks on a game when u can buy some more RAM or HDD space or a spectacular graphic card with it.
The gaming industry, film industry and music industry are the worst hit by piracy. With over 200 music mp3's (more than 15 albums) being loaded in a CD, worth 50 bucks, who'd buy them for 15*200=3000 bucks? Even sometimes you can get them for 15 bucks. There are people (calling from my experience) who uses 40GB of his 120GB HDD for storing 12,000 music mp3's and 20GB with games and 40GB with 40 full movies.
Advanced softwares like PhantomCD, VirtualCD etc which creates a virtual image of the once inserted CD and makes the computer believe that the original CD is still the CD-drive. Thus, even the softwares which cannot be easily cracked are easily pirated.
Softwares like Audiograbber, Windows Media Player, etc crumple huge audio files in as little as 2or3 Mb files. Hudreds of copyrighted books are freely distributed over the internet. The movie which even hasn't released, goes out in the black market.
All these do incur a huge loss. But you cant deny that these make a great market for the softwares and the games. The good movies get a huge popularity and a ready audience and on the other hand bad movies fail to make the least success and smashes even before the release.
The main theme is money. But this is well understoob, no matter how good a programmer you are there is still a better programmer then you. No matter how tight the security, the software will get cracked. There are even online sites which readily supply the chits and keys for all popular softwares and there is a readily going separate industry which concentrate on making 'key-generators' following the logic of the worldwide keys.
My solution :
The only way to utilise this is to make it free and commercial. Distribute all softwares freely from the beginning direct from the manufacturer, but make a small change, create advertisement bars somewhere in the game or use real company names in the graphics, songs, movies, books. Suppose Harry Potter says, "Oh! This drink of Pepsi really replenished me.", would Pepsi deny paying up a multi-million bucks, with the sale rate being 125 books per second on the first day in Kolkata alone ? Like popular newspapers put some introductory prices like 50 bucks or anything like that (so that you wont see free copies of Harry Potter lying astray or streets flooded with CDs!) and you'll see the difference !
Is anybody hearing me out ? I'd really like comments on this subject !
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