Regional differences in P2P

Alexei Roudnev alex at relcom.net
Sat Jul 17 07:17:37 UTC 2004


> On Fri, 16 Jul 2004, Florian Weimer wrote:
>
> > Private FTP sites seem to be more common among those who trade
> > unlicensed, copyrighted material for profit.  This is clearly
> > criminal.  Certainly this isn't what your average P2P user is doing.
>
> Has anyone ever done a money trail investigation regarding this? The only
> people I ever thought was making money off of copyrighted material was the
> people selling "warez CDs" in the small ads in the paper, and that was 5-8
What? 5 - 8 years ago? Warez CD-s?

Guys, THE ONLY reason why computers became so popular over the world (except
USA and a few European countries) is - because 99% of all software
installations in the world was installed as a free (of licensing) software.
Official statistics is absolutely wrong, because there is not any good way
to count it. Believe me, uf people over the world pay license fees, they
never insrtall even 1/20of software they use today (so they never purchase
90% of compurers they use today, and so Internet should not became
worldwide, and children did not learn computing in schools and so on).

Reason is very simple. Here in USA MS Windows XP cost is about (let's say)
$200 - $100 (OEM) - not a problem vs. parking fee/month, house rental, and
so on. In country like Russia, it is 20 - 50% of monthly salary. In country
like Georgia, it is 200% of monthly salary. To break this OS and have it
'free of charge' , it is requirted to spend 1 - 2 weeks (usually much less)
of qualified engineer - approx 4 * average salary. Guess, what people are
doing - they have all this things as  'free' software (they just have not
other chance to survive). They do pay if they began to use it for making
money, but for all other purposes - they never do it. And someone makes
installation disks, broke fancy licenses, burn CD's., makes documentation -
they earn money, for sure.

It is EXTREMELY naive to believe this 'warez CD, 5 years ago'. De facto,
software was ALWAYS free of charge, except - in production areas in all
countries, and except rich countries (ending on such as central Russia with
$500 - $1000 / months for qualified people). And what makes people to pay
licenses is not 'anti pirating efforts' - believe me, my friends could
purchase any software in Russia 10 years ago - they can do it now , without
sugnificant problems (sometimes, it changed so that you do not have CD's
with bright labels, but download software, have ZIP disk, etc etc.. - no
matter). What drives people to pay licenses is overall living level - when
it became comparable to every day dining or weekly supermarket shoping, they
selects licensed systems (and I can say, that MS installation disk is !@#$
compared with contrafacted installation disk purchased on he gray
market! -:) - at least it was 5 years ago).

But you must understand - if there is 1000 unlicensed copies of XXX
software, this DOES NOT MEAN that vendor lost 1000*license-price of the
profit - no, he lost only 1000*payed-price (which can be 2 - 10,000 times
less). This 1000*license-price money did not existed in the world. So, total
loss is much less than claimed in lawsuites (sometimes, it is not any loss
at all because unlicensed software works as a demo - trial for production
systems). It all depends of environment - if you sell 100 copies of MS
Windows for $10 each in San Francisco, Microsoft loss about 20 * $250 + 80 *
$10 (because 20 of this 100 was ready to pay full price); if you sold 100 MS
Windows in Sibiria's sity Irkutsk $10 each, MS lost about $10 * 99 + $250 *
1. Sometimes they even got a profit, if 5 of this 100 used this system for
trial and then recommended their bank to upgrade so that bank purchased 20
legal copies for employees.

It is all much more complicated that we can thiunk living in rafinated and
100% sterile world of Amerika.

> ago. Back then it was quite common for people to pay to get a CDR with
> stuff, I haven't heard about that in a long time now.
>
> I would believe that most of the money now being made is from counterfit
> software where people put up basically a whole organisation with printing
> presses for manuals, real CD/DVD pressing equipment and perhaps even the
Who need this manuals and labels? It is 5 cheap copiers, 1 cheap printer,
somewhere in the suburban... enough to make a money.
Of course, closing big factories helped... not to decrease copying, but to
increase price a little... Do not be too naive. And do not forget P2P.

It is fanny - I am not sure about software (never saw) but I saw
contrafacted (I am 100% sure)  audio and video in San Franciscco area many
times.

And _there are not any real_ statistics about software usage in the world. I
think, that numbers are not correct even in the 'scale'.

> holographic mark, and shrinkwrap it all and sell it as the real thing.
>
> That has very little to do with p2p, though. I am not aware of any money
> changing hands in p2p.
>
> -- 
> Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se
>




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