The Future
The rapid increase in piracy rates around the world has proven to software
producers that piracy will not go away on its own. Software makers are
pursuing different strategies in order to minimize their losses due to
pirated software. Some of these strategies include:
New business model
Many software makers, including Microsoft, are trying to transition from being
a producer of products to being a provider of integrated products and
services. The rise of ASPs (Application Service Providers) has given software
makers a new tool in fighting piracy by withholding the means by which
pirates may obtain illegal copies of software. The new business model may
allow businesses to remove the threat of piracy.
Lobbying for trade sanctions
Several countries in the far east, including China and Vietnam, have
demonstrated
particularly egregious examples of governments willing to turn a blind eye
towards piracy. With trade sanctions, the U.S. government can leverage
American economic power to force other governments to protect the
interests of software manufacturers.
Legal action
The U.S. government has recently cracked down on pirates involved in
large-scale software duplication, and has passes several laws to make
copyright law enforcement easier. At the same time, companies may
file civil suits for damages incurred, against individuals and organizations
found to be involved in software piracy.
Stricter copy protection
It is an unfortunate fact that most of the methods of copy protection in
use today can be defeated fairly easily. Many producers, it seems, do not
take software piracy seriously. If major software makers cooperated by
coming up with a stronger copy protection scheme (building a copy protection
API into the Windows operating system, for example), copy protection would
become both easier to implement and harder to crack.
Free software
Several alternative distribution models are available to software
manufacturers. These models rely on providing the software to end users
free of charge. The Open Source model
is one of the examples of a system of software production and distribution
that would get rid of software piracy and the necessity of copy protection.
Meterware
The meterware concept is basically making software analogous to a home
utility, like electricity or running water. A software package would have
a counter (or meter) built into the system which would monitor how much
use the user is obtaining from the software. The simplest rubric for
measuring the amount of use would be the amount of time the program is not
idle. At the end of every month (or whatever the billing period happened
to be), the counter would be remotely read by the vendor's server. The
customer would then be billed appropriately. The software itself would
be provided free of charge, thus eliminating piracy.
Advocates of meterware argue that this would be the most economically
efficient and fair way to charge people for software.
Fatware
Fatware is a term given to bloated software packages, such as Microsoft
Word, which now takes up over 30 megabytes, and is a classic example of
a program with hundreds of unneeded, not to say annoying, features. The
one positive effect that comes out of fatware is the difficulty in
pirating it. Wing Commander III, for example, was packaged on 6 CD-ROMs,
making its piracy very difficult.
Value-added Services
This method is based on the simple assumption that people will more readily
pay for something if they'll see benefits from it. How can companies
make someone pay for their programs if they can obtain the same program
for free? Software makers can make paying for software seem more attractive
by providing value-added services, such as free and helpful technical
support, training classes, free future upgrades, and other "freebies" that
come along with registering and paying for software.