Pirates.

[BuzzKillington]

http://www.baekdal.com/opinion/piracy-or-not

I agree with most of this.

I also feel that all games should have an available demo. I can't count the number of times games have been hyped up, trailers have been grossly exaggerated, I pre-ordered the game and they bombed! I wasted 50-60 dollars on a game that was misadvertised and since the keycode was now used, it's unsellable. I could sell the account but that's technically illegal because even though you paid for the game and have rights to your account, it's technically not yours.

Also, there's some great software out there that comes with a trial version but have severe limitations on top of the 7-30 day trial period. This limits the possibility of gaining knowledge by self-teaching yourself how to use the software AND doesn't give you an accurate taste of it's capabilities or learning scale. Do I really want to pay $500 dollars for something that may be extremely hard to learn just for learning sake? Probably not... but if the trial gave me full access I could get a taste and if the time came where the software was needed, one wouldn't be completely in the dark about what they're getting in to.

[x88x]

I also agree with a lot of what that article says. Speaking from personal experience, the two largest reasons that people pirate stuff are 1) convenience and 2) cost, usually in that order. Take college students for example. No way on earth are they ever going to actually buy al of the media that they consume..it's a financial impossibility. There have been a couple companies who have tried to attack this market with really very appealing products, but have ended up dying because other alternatives were more convenient. Anyone remember that service that would let college students stream just about any music for free? ...with the client that could not be minimized? ...yeah, I was good and used it for a couple months, but really it's just a PITA, especially if you're working with limited screen real estate, like a lot of college students are. Convenience, like I said earlier, I think is the biggest motivator by far. I used to ..shall we say, "utilize alternative multimedia sources" .. a lot, but once I got an internet connection that could actually handle streaming services (hulu, netflix, etc), that basically stopped. I don't even know how much time I used to waste getting the latest TV episode for all the shows I watch. Now I just tell Hulu to put all the new episodes in my queue, and when they appear there I watch them. It's a simple, convenient, free service, and I LOVE it. So much so that I'm almost definitely going to be getting a Hulu Plus subscription once it's available. I already am a Netflix subscriber, with the cheapest plan that lets me stream stuff. I've had the account for almost 2 years now, iirc, and I've had them send me one disc..one...and that wasn't even to me, that was to my dad! The one problem I have with Netflix and Hulu...well, isn't a problem with Netflix or Hulu..it's with the studios they work with. Specifically with Netflix. Only something like 20% of Netflix's library is actually available for streaming because of the restrictions that the various studios and licensing organizations put on their stuff. I don't understand that..I can have the disc mailed to me, a service which costs a fair bit in pressing the disc, marketing and packaging, processing, packaging for mailing to me, postage, and probably more stuff that I don't know about..but I can't stream it? A service which costs...a tiny fraction of the power and bandwidth that Netflix's servers use every day.