cheers

As a dedicated user of OiNK for quite some time, I can tell you that I would not have purchased anything I downloaded from there. In fact, over 90% of what I downloaded from there was obscure/unavailable in the country where I live/out-of-print, or otherwise impossible to get ahold of.

I never donated a penny but I uploaded at a 3:1 ratio, finding tons of old CDs I had bought while in Asia years back and 2-or-3 other people were interested in hearing those things which were limited edition [asian record label name here] or vinyl 1976 Deutsche Gramophon, never reissued Stockhausen recordings and the like.

Technically, did it violate certain countries’ copyright laws? Yes. And I speed when I drive too.

I will admit, sooooooooooo many people downloaded the new Modest Mouse and Arcade Fire albums that there was definitely some lost revenue there. I had only a vague idea who these bands were, downloaded seeked through the tracks and deleted them both, not my cup of tea, frankly.

@Richard: respect for your plight, it seems that intelligent music was trying to protect its software at a difficult musical crossroads and Cycling 74 now has a pretty robust copy-protection scheme (there was an H20 release for the PC a while back, but no jitter) and people buy it.

The software industry is most-likely heading towards a combination of open-source and niche-market (Like Max/MSP/Jitter) commercial tools. Radiohead (and Madonna) are not waiting around to get played by the complacent record industry that refuses to evolve.

read this:

http://www.demonbaby.com/blog/2007/10/when-pigs-fly-death-of-oink-birth-of.html

Why couldnt they offer a comprimise and ask users to pay some kind of monthly fee. From the outcry of oink users I am sure most would have been happy to pay around $30 a month? what’s $30 by 180000? well it’s a hell of a lot more then they would have been getting anyway!

So instead of approaching the oink owner in a civilized business manour and proposing to help him expand the site, mainting quality and impress 180000 people with their forwared thinking they took something a lot of people love and threatened every user with possible legal action.

Am I a pirate now?!”

Unless you’re using the OS X version, no.

“Am I a pirate now?!”

Depends on which version you’re using. For example, Cycling 74 sells certain version of M. Atari version is freeware (it seems that’s the version you0re using, since you’re mentioning emulator).

You’re just stating what I already said. Of course there’s “that” 10% of users, and they can almost directly translate to lost sales because of piracy. That’s exactly what I said. Nowhere did I claim anything opposite, nor did I anywhere claim “how” bad (or “good”) things are. I just pointed to fact that majority of pirated software downloaders never were potential buying customers (like I said – vast majority never installs application X, and of minority that does installs only smaller percentage actually uses that app, and of that percentage only small percentage would actually be potential buyers, if that app wasn’t available any other way then buying it – of course that sometimes that percentage of percentage of percentage can be actually 5000 users, I never even implied that it couldn’t be the case).

Nowhere did I directly (or indirectly for that matter) said that people SHOULD download pirated software, or that companies DON’T loose money because of software piracy (obviously they do, I’m not an idiot, you know…).

I have a feeling you want to see something that doesn’t exist in my comments / posts.

As for me going into music software business – why should I? I have totally different job, which I absolutely love and I’m neither business man, nor software programmer. I have no reason whatsoever to do that (at least for now, who knows what the future can bring), and I wouldn’t do it even if it’s best paying job in the world and there’s no such thing as software piracy.

Am I a pirate now?!

Initially we released our software only on the Mac, and we used PACE floppy-based copy protection, as most of the developers did then. Our sales were decent and supported the company, but were mostly US-based. We knew, though, that most of the MIDI computer users in Europe worked on the Atari ST platform, and so we started developing our software for Atari and selling through European distributors. I don’t recall the name of the copy protection we used, but it wasn’t as robust as PACE.

Once we started selling our products in Europe, a clear pattern deveoped – we’d release a product, sales would be good for the first 2 weeks, and then they would just stop. They wouldn’t just slow down, they’d stop, and we wouldn’t sell a single copy after that in Germany or France. Our distributors told us that they investigated the issue, and found that within the first 2 weeks, the protection would be cracked and the software would then be distributed manually through the user community. After that, no sales. In most cases, we wouldn’t even make back our development costs, much less make a profit. And this community wasn’t just hobbyists, but people who used our software to make successful records.

Intelligent Music closed its doors in 1990, just before we were going to release Max (we were the original developers), and I and my co-workers all lost our jobs. Software piracy wasn’t the only reason, but it definitely contributed.