Piracy is not theft, Lost sales don't exist, says Minecraft creator (2011)

Re:Piracy is not theft, Lost sales don't exist, says Minecra... by ad404b8a372f2b9 on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @12:38PM (#26331767)

There are millions of pirate so you can assume this doesn't happen to most people. If the expected return on piracy was negative people would not pirate. With trusted uploaders you can also reduce the risk further because if they release malware their reputation will be ruined. That's not even taking into account the fact that people already run non-pirate executable code without auditing it from basically anywhere so the risk is about even I'd think.

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Re:Piracy is not theft, Lost sales don't exist, says Minecra... by wing-_-nuts on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @12:52PM (#26331971)

The phrase 'if you're not the customer, you're the product' comes to mind. I could easily see malware being installed that flies under the radar, and the type of person that runs random executable code willy nilly is not the sort of person that would be able to trace malware back to one vector.

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Re:Piracy is not theft, Lost sales don't exist, says Minecra... by deadmetheny on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @01:00PM (#26332105)

>The phrase 'if you're not the customer, you're the product' comes to mind

That doesn't really apply to the warez scene. People aren't releasing cracked software for profit, they're doing it for the challenge and to say they were the first to do it. It's pure ego.

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Re:Piracy is not theft, Lost sales don't exist, says Minecra... by snet0 on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @02:13PM (#26332989)

I think that's almost certainly the case for the people actually cracking the software, but because a lot of the time there isn't like a "Steam Store for Cracked Videogames" or similar for software, it can require significant effort to find the canonical source.

If you know of some common Adobe patcher tool, or Windows activator, and just do a Google search for its name, what fraction of those download links will have a matching hash to the original release?

You are right that, in the non-repackaged-with-additional-malware case, it seems a lot of the guys doing the cracking are just puzzle-solvers. Weeks to crack some Ubisoft DRM but probably never even touched the game.

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Re:Piracy is not theft, Lost sales don't exist, says Minecra... by meepmorp on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @01:27PM (#26332451)

I'm not sure that precludes that cracked software being redistributed with added malware.

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Re:Piracy is not theft, Lost sales don't exist, says Minecra... by ad404b8a372f2b9 on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @01:18PM (#26332351)

I think pretty much all developers run random code willy nilly. People don't check the stuff they install through their package managers nor the dependencies of those packages, except the most anal ones.

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Re:Piracy is not theft, Lost sales don't exist, says Minecra... by a1369209993 on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @03:49PM (#26334295)

> If the expected return on [X] was negative people would not [X].

Not that your conclusion happens to be wrong, but you do know people buy lottery tickets, right?

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