Enfour is a software company that primarily makes dictionaries for Apple devices and, understandably, doesn’t like piracy. So if you find a way to steal an Enfour app, here’s what might show up on your iPhone screen:
And if you’ve given the app permission to access your Twitter account, here’s what you’ll tweet:
However — and this is a big “However” — this could happen to you even if you’ve paid fifty bucks for the software which, also understandably, makes some people rather angry.
Enfour has issued an apology — oddly enough in a PDF rather than a simple page on their website — but plans to keep fighting piracy because, they claim, there are 100 pirated copies of their software for every legally purchased copy. I’d like to see some evidence for this ratio, since it’s about twenty to twenty-five times higher than the usual estimates for the industry as a whole. So the claim seems pretty unlikely, to say the least.
But there’s no doubt that piracy is a real problem for companies like Enfour. The question is whether that problem can best be addressed by treating all your customers as potential or even likely criminals.
I suppose this sort of thing bothers some people more than others. A few years ago I went into a nearby Fry’s Electronics store and after waiting in line to pay had to wait in line again to have my property searched. Well, actually, I didn’t have to submit to the search, but I preferred not to make a big fuss. I just decided that I wasn’t going to shop there any more, and I haven’t. But the store’s still open and the parking lot is is often pretty full — so perhaps few others mind. I’m often surprised by what people are willing to put up with from companies they’re paying money to.
Alan Jacobs 
hetzer 
David Ryan 
Gerard 
Ethan C. 
EliteCommInc. 
Michael Straight 
I used to use a non-linear video editing package called Media 100.
Media 100 was a hardware based system. You bought a card from them, and put it in one of the slots of your Macintosh.
You also got some discs; floppies or a CD, I can’t remember anymore.
You also got some “dongles” that you daisy-chained on your keyboard. Different features were enabled, depending on which dongles you had. A full-featured system would have about 4 dongles and cost about $35,000. If you lost a dongle, it was no different than if you had dropped a camera overboard. It was gone, those features were disabled, and you’d have to pay to get a new dongle to re-enable the software that you had “bought”.
My belief is that the current regime is unsustainable. When it’s music, or movies, or books, it’s very easy for copyright minimalists to cry “You’re a dinosaur, get a new business model!”
Fine, whatever, I did. To put that in perspective, our recently completed boat took about as much time (12 months) and cost about as much money (~$100k) as one of the movies I used to make; movies I could only afford to make on the premise that I owned them, and could sell people the right to view them.
But the larger “new business model” is that people put time, money, effort, and risk into making things that exist in a purely digital form, and history suggested that only a small portion of what makes our economy work can be supported by advertising. Advertising is a legitimate enterprise as an adjunct and enabler of real transactions. As a dominant model, it’s a ponzy scheme.
I agree, the above example is clumsy. But my belief is that a functioning economy for digital goods is inevitable. Since a functioning economy cannot exist in an environment that favors thieves over paying customers, systems and practices will arise to correct this (see media theorist Tony Comstock’s brilliant application of Climax Ecology to digital socio-economics.)