The Computer Chronicles - Software Piracy (1985)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 พ.ย. 2012
- Although a major problem in the computing world today, software piracy is certainly not a new issue, and has been plaguing software developers even in this episode of The Computer Chronicles from 1985.
Special thanks to archive.org for hosting these episodes. Downloads of all these episodes and more can be found at: archive.org/details/computerch...
0:30
I know its 1985, but that 8" floppy caught me off guard
Yeah, since 5,25 was the defacto standard and 3.5 was on it's way in....
Indeed, that was like a comedy sketch scene which made me chuckle. Taking into account that those 8" floppies were already old by this time and people in this series are often clearly jesting a bit, I'd assume the producers had the comical intent themselves in mind as well, even while by modern point of view it probably seems yet more funny.
Nevertheless, when the context is gradually lost in time, it always gets more and more difficult to estimate what was intentional and what not.
Almost larger than Stewart!
That’s what she said
Yeah that's one giant ass floppy disk.
God that floppy disk at the beginning seemed comically big when I first saw it. I wasnt ready for that.
Yeah, I didn't know software pirates were using mainframes and minicomputers to make their copies.
Pretty sure most pirates just used mini floppies or diskettes lol
Nice time stamp
I feel so bad for Mark, he's assulted on tv about his program when trying to express a point they won't validate, poor guy
yeah this, Locksmith was intended for people who want a functioning backup for their own use.
of course, there's always going to be someone who abuses that, but that's not the fault of the person who created the copying software.
A crowbar can be used to break into a house, it’s ridiculous to gripe about legitimate tools because people can misuse them.
aCtIVISION has GoOd CuSTOMer SerVICe ! if your software faults, just call us! Why should you be able to make your own copies of OUR intellectual property??
Gary Kildall: "Software piracy is a very serious issue. Let's take the case of Bill Gates."
The head of Activision speaks against "unethical practises", lol. Yeah, its not the modern Activision. But still, the irony.
I would like to apologize for putting Microsoft out of business in 1995 when I pirated Windows 95 after losing my Compaq specific install of it that I wasn't given a copy of. I regret my actions 😭
You bastard!
Your joke doesn’t really work since that’s not really the “spirit” of piracy.
Didn't take 'em too long to use the old "same as stealing a car" analogy, did it?
Yeah, pretty bad example as the original owner will lose the car unlike software piracy, where there is no original owner, it’s just some binaries, libraries, and assets consisting of 0’s and 1’s. A better example would be photocopying a proprietary blueprint for a car, and then distributing it for free, which has specific instructions for how to build that specific car. Now of course, it’s not easy or cheap to build a car, but I think you get the point.
6:05 A completely relatable Porsche analogy. Except it would be more accurate if the Porsche thief - who could never purchase a Porsche and therefore is not in the market for one - manages to duplicate the Porsche without depriving the owner of his property.
Developers still would like to recieve a paycheck at the end of the month. I know that I want to, at least.
It has always amazed how prevalent this kind of limping analogues have been for decades. One can metaphorically steal a thought, but in concrete sense that should require that the original thinker could lo longer think about it. That's how it is also with copying software - the original owner is not losing it. Illegal yes, but not a steal.
If it would genuinely be stealing, locking up the physical media inside a safe should reduce software piracy.
Except these analogies break down when you extend them to their logical conclusions. If a person starts making money off that Porsche like people would do with software, now what? If he’s making a tiny amount is it ok but if he makes a billion dollars it’s not? And what entitles that dude to use the software even if he’s not paying for it? Why do the rules suddenly not apply because something is easy to do?
Smith McKeithen's arguments are full of fallacies He is misusing "ripped off" and "stealing" to overplay the severity of users' actions.
10:23 blindly trying to blame the HW manufacturer
10:40 it is not a zero-sum game, exactly because software can be copied (you don't need to steal it from somebody)
21:13 This guy repeated several times that prices would drop a lot if everybody was paying. I highly doubt that. It also assumes a lot more people would pay for the software if they couldn't copy it. Also, assuming market pricing, "piracy" would drive prices down, not up.
10:00 Good for Gary pushing back. By 1985, users needed to manage their own systems, to include redundancy. They shouldn't have to rely on a company to send a replacement, especially in those days when companies came and went.
Also , and this is significant as well to the era, replacements would have to ship out, could take days or more likely weeks to receive. And contacting the company alone cost money as most of them did not have toll free support lines, and long distance calls you paid for by the minute back then. That was an era where you had an issue, you had to pay a per minute fee to listen to a company's support line hold music (sometimes for hours in certain parts of the year) just to get support/replacement. Meanwhile if this is some sort of mission criticized business software, you're hampered or halted while awaiting replacement.
I remember an “archival backup program” for the Amiga back in the day called “Marauder”. It could copy any disk except for one: itself. That’s all you need to know about “backup” programs.
Eventually we were using another Amiga copy app to copy Marauder too!!! Actually nothing is eassier than a copy prog not copying itself.
Had no idea the comb-over was so stylish in the 80's.
I don't think it was ever stylish, just desperate.
Oof they sure looked bad
Um, I hate to break this to y'all, but those aren't combovers. They're toupes. Men back then (and a few even still) would say to themselves, no one's going to believe a full head of hair...but I can pull this off. I know. I know. (Not kidding).
I get the challenge concept. I used to spent hours disassembling 6502 code to figure out the copy protection schemes. I even wrote a disassembler! I think it informed my future career; pirate.
Yarrr, matey
The "PC Talk" people were totally correct. I was given a copy of PC-Talk from a friend, ending up buying it almost instantly, passed it on to others, who all also ended up buying.
People actually want to be honest about these things, and will in fact pay for things they use, so long as the price is reasonable.
One of the reasons for this is that Andrew Fluegelman died some days after this episode.
14:27 of course, Microsoft would lower the prices of their products if all pirated copies were paid for. In which universe does this man live? Microsoft was definitely not going to lower its prices, and neither would most other software houses. That was a stupid statement.
This is where a lot of software developers screwed up.They had the idea of selling 1 million copies for $700 instead of selling 100 million copies for $70.
+joseph fulks - I wish Adobe saw it your way.
They don't even sell copies anymore, everything is "as a service" these days
Unless employed by Mega Corp where a fixed salary is paid for the rights to your work, most other (independent) developers had to distribute through a publisher, who upped the price exorbitantly. They monopolized the distribution system.
For once Paul's commentary was on the right tracks though.
@@CopperheadSysop and now we all switch to foxit ... You have no idea how shocked Adobe representative when I told him this 4 tears ago.
Where is Frankie Mouse today? Did he become a millionaire hacker or is he in prison?
Prison
You see, this is where I think Shareware is the answer - give you user a usable (but feature limited) version and if they want the full features, sell them the full version at a REASONABLE price.
*yOu wOuLd'Nt StEaL a PoRsChE!*
Neil’s combover is a pirate copy of Stewart’s.
HAHAHAHAHAHA
IM DEAD
14:47
Neil: Quite a bitch...
Me: Watch your language, mister!
I doubt a company would ever lower their prices because they are selling so many.
How many years would it take? Like 2 to even notice, and 5 years of incredible profit, and would just release next version prob cost more.
Every Amiga and ST disk i owned were copies. Bought every sunday from the carboot sale.
It was rife wasn’t it - same experience - it’s interesting how brazen it was! That must’ve been their main distribution method before bulletin boards were more commonplace.
I was a software pirate in the 80ies and early 90ies. As were all my friends and classmates. Didn´t know anyone with a computer back then who wasn´t. Always looked forward to go to school and wondered what new games i would get my hands on this day.
The classic 3.25" trades at your locker haha, good days
Damn, that is one hell of a big floppy disk at the beginning. The ones for my C64 were large enough yet did not even come close to that monster
Nice to see Activision were scumbags even back then.
They should have used the analogy..."When you buy a Porsche...you don't get a "back up " Porsche."
Let's hope Mark never decided to name his son Richard....
14:47 ... Careful, language ;)
I'm telling.
That's more floppy than man.
I believe that the original edition of crucial program software should be able to make a back up copy, this way the original software can be stored away in an archive and one can use the back up copy until it becomes corrupted.
Holy snap! The Cap'n!
*whistles in 2600hz*
On the software vendor who "encouraged" piracy by calling on user's honesty; I bet a positive side-effect to this was to save hundreds of bugs on diskettes, and considerably lowering the cost of distribution. :)
Yeah, and they've since learned (especially in the modern age), that you can't really count on user honesty if the penalty for piracy is a slap on the wrist/ "everybody does it". GoG depends on user honesty, and there are torrents of their full catalog available.
And I'd much rather shop there than Steam.
Yellowblanka: I can't agree with the punishment being soft. Some have to actually serve time in prison, and I guess up to 5 years, 11 years in some cases in a small handful even 20 years+, - the max anyone has so far gotten is life without, is rather harsh. Also there is always the possibility to pay high fines, and this can quickly lead to financial ruin for some of those caught possessing or distribution. Depending on the country one comes from of course, the punishment is different. Germany, for instance, the BKA hasn't much cared for software piracy in the past. Lately they cease property and even sports cars, whatever they find if they catch a distributor of Software/Games. (Interestingly, the pirates aren't always out there in the wild, but sitting in the company who creates the DVD or CD the games are stored on.)
Yes, all their titles are available. The same is true for each and every piece of software and/or game. Not exclusively PC games but also almost every title that has ever been published for handhelds and consoles, and this is crazy. I mean, whoever takes it upon themselves to download all these, they will never be able to play more than a handful of it.
Why not simply buy a game, and there are many out there one can have hundreds of hours of fun with it, and over time grow a collection, with that special game to look back on someday in the future.
Anyway, yes, some things will never change, but there is always a possibility. :-)
Gahl Blah: At the end of the day what matters is that money lands in the pockets of those who create and publish the game. ;-)
Yeah the punishments definitely aren't a "slap on the wrist".
Piracy has never been more justified. Scum like GOG and Steam want you to give them money for something that is infinitely copyable and has no scarcity. Especially GOG since one of the cofounders used to sell pirated games before he cofounded CDPR, but now that it is more profitable to be "legit" he is against piracy. No reason you should be giving money to GOG when goodolddownloads exists
Aren't we still having the whole piracy debate to this day? Has anything really changed in 40 years?
aaa how wonderful to hear how the Locksmith made the apple 2 drives sound.
Bullshit, an MS-DOS era word processor did not take a team of 60 developers years to make. Costs like that are brought in as business expenses anyway, which is why they could get away with their asking prices.
War...
War never changes.
Fallout 1 and 2 allowed installing full game, so, disk was not needed for playing. Great in every way.
I also know a guy (he wrote this comment), who has a pile of software he did not buy..
/j at Stewart Cheifet
Neil looks just like Stewart!
$40 in 1985 dollars for Night Mission. Yikes! It was a great pinball game but would you pay the equivalent $110 for almost any game today? And they wonder why piracy was so rampant.
0:30 look at that chopping board!
I loved the news that we spend 12.2 hours a week on our PC. Man I spend more than that a day! I love being single!
this is still relevant
That tax filing from your computer just might take off someday.
@27:03 "If you bump it to hard it tillts"
Lol, Video Pinball for the Atari 2600 already had that feature and Schindler is amazed by it in 1985?!?
In another episode he states that his family doesn't have a game console but they play PC games, so I'm not surprised that he never owned/played that game on the 2600.
This all comes back to the infamous EULA found with all software, basically you're buying a licence to use it and only in the terms of said licence. Who ever read those things before clicking accept🤔🤔
1:10 look at that background... I believe those are color codes, but im not sure.
Nope, that is freshly initialized RAM being dumped in the monitor on an Apple II system. When the Apple II boots it initializes the unused memory to the pattern of FF FF 00 00 which is two bytes of all 1s and two bytes of all 0s.
Lol, according to Acivision it took 2000 hours for total creation for a piece of quality software. Should that even lead up to, say 1 million total cost and investment, then only 2000 copies at 500 US$ each (e.g. Wordperfect, Lotus 123 although from different companies) would already broke-even such development project... I suppose owning a Lamborghini, an estate, boats, airplanes and financial stocks was to be the norm for the owners of the software houses, lol. Oh wait, it was/is...
Ironically, one of the most pirated pieces of Apple II software was... Locksmith.
So the pinball game in 1985 costs just $40 which would be $115 today. 😮
Don't copy that floppy, kids. ☝️
The company that wrote the program in BASIC deserved to get cracked.
I would have punched the Activision guy...
15:13 What is "Klan Cookout" and who was pirating that?
"Why are people pirating software? Could it be the cost? No, never"
also: "Buy this 4-colour pinball game only $40 1985 dollars!!!"
I'm a programmer myself, so I'm sympathetic to the argument that programmers don't get paid for their work. But when a major company charges an exorbitant fee for software, most of that doesn't even go into the pockets of programmers but to BS like marketing and typesetting. I don't care about a company's revenue in the slightest.
I much prefer a system where you obtain software for free and if you feel like kicking a few bucks to the programmer(s) for their good work, you do so. That seems a lot less exploitative to me than big companies crying crocodile tears about "intellectual property".
And nowadays everyone pirates Adobe products because of their stupid subscription model that drains money from their users.
As long as publishers incentivize people to pirate software without offering a satisfactory alternative, software piracy will exist.
If i should name one who deserved to get its apps illegally copied Adobe would be first in the list.
I been using app store apps, cause $50 a year. Over $50 a month. I would spent $500 for whole collection but all this cloud crap
has anyone ever gone to jail over copying a floppy disc like the attorney said
The people he directly went after was a group who I believe selling stuff through catalogs. Mr. Mouse more just hacking games to see if likes them, then him and friends all share copies.
So if Christmas came, 5 friends each get a game, they swap them around. Does it matter if original or if made a copy, as your friends won't buy it either way. I guess there are those games everyone wants and less likely to buy if friend gave you a copy.
That's not a floppy disk... THIS is a floppy disk... 😂
Inb4 patent trolls shit themselves when Linux came around. :D
Mark PUMP
14:47 He said the "bitch" word! 😧
15:12 "Klan Cookout"
Wow it actually was floppy
Locksmith, the first ISO creator 😄
been a pirate from atari 800 days arrrrrgh.
19:35 the piratebay circa 1984.
lol my thoughts exactly!
9:28 - Cry harder buddy... 🤣🤣
Hearing men in suits saying they'd lower prices, and dont think quite get the hackers motives. Archival has become so needed, as men in suits and their lawyers dont care about preservation as want you to buy the new version of older better things you already "own".
Franky is really just a snitch.
Hella funny they had him on at same time as a lawyer. I would have done segment alone, and wore a funny disguise.
1:55 so, tu sum up, People buying oryginał software pay Double price: for their product and for pirates. Nice deal:))
LOL, you aint stealing much on an 8 inch floppy disk
23:55 $700 for something that's 1/4 of Microsoft office yet 7 times the cost?!
Microsoft Office used to cost $1500 as well. Before that they sold Excel and Word etc all separately and it would be even more added up, easily a few thousands. Bill '100 billion' Gates' fortune is based on those fat years.
If you find business computer magazines from 1992, or 1998 and 2003 you can see the price development of these expensive commercial software suites.
And this was the price back then, inflation adjusted in 2023 this is $2,000 !
this is why i love open source/ linux. everything is free :)
Uh, no. It’s open source, which doesn’t equal free.
@@BlownMacTruck if you're paying for open source software you're doing it wrong lol
@@faerieringwildlifeandmore God you’re dumb. Apparently you don’t know anything about Red Hat, XNU, ElasticSearch, or any of the other huge number of giant open source projects like the ones I mentioned that use paid models.
Don’t get me wrong - I think open source is amazing. I use it daily and have been a part of numerous OS projects over more than two decades. But you’re not doing yourself any favors by not understanding what it actually means. Maybe learn about open source and how it relates to freedom as a start. Here’s a hint: open source folks make a clear distinction between “free” and “free as in beer” - it’s a common phrase in the community. Learn what it means before making yourself look so ignorant.
@@BlownMacTruck how about this. I only like open source software that is free as in freedom AND free as in beer
Lock Smith getting railed 😂
Oh, so smith McKeithen is partly responsible for the bs at Activision. Yikes
How could these haircuts be legal? 😅
Whoever is copying your floppies is a horrible person. People didn’t and still don’t care about piracy, just the developers care.
When you realize Activision was a shity company even in the 80ies.
paul S. is so boring. something about him makes me irk
piracy is more justified than ever. digital distribution should not be paid for and that is the only way to legally attain many games and music
You’re not paying (much) for the distribution. You never have, even with physical media. You’re just paying the developers. Everyone wants pay for their time and labor - don’t you? I don’t think it’s a difficult concept to grasp.
@@nickwallette6201 it’s the fundament of capitalism.
Lol. Did you all read the screen names handles? Lololo. KLANCOOKOUT!