I had my first company (called macrowarp, silly name, I didn't choose
it) bankrupt due to "piracy". It was a very specific case, we had a
big contract for creating a web portal, it was very big so we devoted
the whole company to it. We were going to earn about 25k USD, this
was enough for the salaries and paying the financing of our machines
and the rent. We used our reserves to keep floating while we
fulfilled that contract. In the end, the contractor was trying to
talk his way into paying less or paying later, one of our directors
decided to try to show them a snapshot of the project so that they'd
be happy with it and pay. They copied the snapshot, we never saw the
money, portal went online and they hired a cheaper company owned by a
relative of one of their employee to maintain it.
we were so broke that we didn't even had the money to sue. legal
system in Brazil is so slow that can take many many years to solve
something. We went bankrupt, closed the company. Weddings were
cancelled, Universities abandoned. I was the one that suffered less,
I just lost two computers and money. And the worst part was seeing
the portal up and seeing my comments in the HTML.
This is not the standard case of piracy but it is piracy indeed. Most
piracy of little sharewares don't hurt, they actually help to spread
the product and if your software is good enough and priced right,
even the pirates will buy it out of goodwill. This was big piracy... :-/
On the other hand, I was the first one to create a Blog client for
the Macintosh, it was done in RB for MacOS 9. It was shareware and it
sold well, never saw piracy but that would just give me more exposure
I think.
andre
On 14 May 2007, at 19:43, David Bovill wrote:
On 14/05/07, Chipp Walters <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Would that suppose we should never copy protect our applications
as we can
use law to sue pirates? That said, I do agree with your 25 lines
restriction.
Out of interest has anyone on this list had software pirated /
re-engineered? I'd be interested to hear of any cases. End user
copying is
very common - but I've not come across stories of someone or
taking an app
and copying the code illegally to sell a derivative version, but
then I
might just be being naive here? Go-on make me paranoid :)
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