One of the great success stories of the digital age has been the growing app industry. For as long as there has been software, there have been clever entrepreneurs who have developed a nifty game or tool and marketed it directly to the public, but in the smart phone era professional possibilities exist like never before. Yes, online distribution is easy, but finding customers is hard. Apple’s App Store makes it much easier for entrepreneurial developer to be found.

Yet a new study by 24/7 Wall St. estimates that three out of every four downloaded apps are pirated copies.

Let’s get real here. Read the comments section of any blog on copyright and you’ll see people rationalizing online infringement by saying (1) they want to stick it to the Man, and (2) prices are simply too high.

From what I can see, Miguel Sanchez-Grice is not The Man. He’s a guy who loved his Atari years back and has created a cool iPhone game called iCombat. This new report notes that iCombat is pirated 75% of the time, consistent with overall industry figures. It costs 99 cents. How many hours of entertainment will a downloader get from that game for 99 cents? It works out to a pretty competitive hourly rate, I would think.

Mr. Sanchez-Grice blogged about his creation being pirated a year ago. He put something into his code that led someone playing a pirated copy to, after a few levels, get a message encouraging them to pay the 99 cents at his site. Here were his results:

There was a high clickthrough rate to my site (only way user could avoid would have been to press home button) but once there ZERO users clicked through to purchase a copy. Maybe if I had mentioned a 1 year old baby this would have been higher.

This particular creator takes what I would call a fairly relaxed view of his piracy. He writes about developing a “lite” version of the software to try to reduce the temptation to pirate; I’d be curious to see how successful that is. Of course, the beauty of copyright is that every creator can choose how they wish to respond to infringement of their rights.

We constantly hear how digital technologies and the Internet empower individuals to create and sell their own works. This is true. We also hear how these creators need to embrace consumer-friendly business models. What is more friendly than obtaining a cool game by clicking a button on your phone and having your account charged less than a dollar?

It’s important that everyone be honest here — if some folks can obtain something without paying for it, they will obtain it. It’s not important to that infringer how much time, effort, creativity and expertise went into that work from the creator. That infringer refuses to believe that creators are encouraged to create because of their rights under copyright — their right to duplicate and distribute their creation in a way they please — and that there will be less incentive to create new works when those rights aren’t respected. For a certain segment of infringers, no argument, no matter how logical or impassioned, will sway them from continuing to infringe.

Not even, I suspect, a mention of a one year old baby.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 14th, 2010 at 12:45 pm by Patrick Ross and is filed under copyright opponents, creators, drm, internet, licensing, piracy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.