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

Free source code exchange 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

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.