Piracy is a problem, but some companies can survive, and others cannot. Is there a list of these companies somewhere? I think it would make for an interesting case study. Thanks in advance.
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I don't think any company can point to piracy as a single point of failure. Take for example Avast, whose antivirus product was pirated and a single licence shared on over 774,000 times - see Single software licence shared 774,651 times. They took the view that people using pirated copies of their software were not "criminals", but potential buyers - read the article for more about this. I'm not saying no company has ever gone out of business due to piracy, as there almost certainly has been some, but I think piracy is only 1 out of a compounding number of factors that cause companies to collapse. |
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Stac Electronics sued the pirates and won, but couldn't ever recover. |
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On the flip side, Eagle computers went out of business because they copied part of the IBM BIOS back in the 80's. |
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It was relatively well-known the Microsoft Windows 3.x and Microsoft Office 3 through 95 were easily pirate-able, or the CD key could easily be faked. While I worked at Microsoft around that time, the general consensus was that, if people rip-off Microsoft's software, they won't bother to buy the competition's, so that'll help us kill off the competition, so no need to chase after them just yet. Businesses tended to get audited and organisations such as the Business Software Alliance made examples of big corporates found to be under-licensed, so this ensured a revenue stream from the business community. Once the products were ubiquitous, the 25-digit licence keys and internet activation started. It almost seems like a deliberate strategy from the beginning, but I think that it evolved this way. I don't recall any Microsoft products requiring a dongle or licence key at the time, yet hardware dongles were very popular with the competition.. I forget who the competitors were... |
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I think no otherwise successful company was ever going out of business because of piracy alone. But some already struggling companies had surely more problems because of piracy. That means also, that there will be no clear case, where you can assign the problems only to one reason, including piracy. So I think such a list you want, that all the candidates will always be in discussion, because it was maybe piracy the last drop ... or something else. |
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Well the Amiga is well known to have been massively pirated as their was no way to limit floppy disk copy at the time, and there was a lot of games. So the piracy occured a lot even in school yards. Commodore died with it. [fixed, thanks commentors] |
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