Martin Banks, Personal Computer World 10/87 - checked

October 1987

Efficiency is not my strong point, and I keep trying to justify this state of affairs by telling myself that efficiency gets in the way of the creative muse. That is perhaps a poor excuse, but it is the only one I can come up with at short notice to hide that fact that I know I have written before about software piracy, taken a `position' on the subject even, but can't remember when or which issue it was in.

Such details wouldn't really matter, except that the subject was raised with some vehemence by an individual who recently wrote to PCW. I say `an individual' because the letter was unsigned, perhaps wisely in the circumstances. The contents of those two short pages were, however, interesting in the extreme. Not only were they the `confessions of a software pirate', the letter dared anyone, including computer journalists, to stand on their self-righteousness and say that they had never pirated a piece of software.

On the subject of computer journalists, for example, the letter talks about our collective hypocrisy. The writer claims to know several of us, "one of whom, who writes for a certain world wide Commodore magazine, brought in to the computer club one night a new Amiga package that had just arrived for review, for us to look at and for the Amiga owners to copy."

The writer also claims to know several games writers, often the most vociferous against piracy (and often with good reason, at least in public) who all have "as much pirated software as the next man". Yes, maybe we are all guilty just a bit, and no doubt we can all find a moral justification `in our own particular case'. I know I can, or try at least.

But the writer doesn't even bother to try. "I cannot justify piracy," the letter says. "I don't need to. I simply don't care about how damaging it is said to be. The software industry has not crashed overnight because of software piracy, and is jogging away quite nicely thank you very much." This would certainly appear to be very true. One just has to look at the financial results of the likes of Lotus and Microsoft to formulate a moral justification that your one naughty copy of 1-2-3 or MS-DOS has hardly damaged their profit margins.

The writer suggests that, if the letter is ever published, the PCW editorial staff would probably put some kind of token condemnation of software piracy at the end of it, just so as to keep in favour with the advertisers. It would be easy to do, and it would be easy for the writer to assume that such supplication was the reason. (I have met enough advertisement sales managers in my time who would want to see such a condemnation written, for just the reason the writer suggests). I am not going to do that here, however. I would like to see a more forthright discussion of what constitutes piracy, and why, for there are degrees of it; the subject is certainly not all black or white.

As I said earlier, it is possible for any of us to come up with a `moral justification' for pirating some software. Here is one of my own. As a writer, I got involved with doing some work for a consultancy company. `Could I write about that subject, and give them the copy on a PC-compatible disk so they could run it through their WP system", they asked. Being a sucker for punishment, I replied yes, and yes.

In the event however, I discovered too late that their WP system was Multimate, which is of course, totally incompatible with WordStar. What made things worse was that I have been using the same old copy of the program for several years, a copy so old it does not contain any facilities to convert Document Mode files into ASCII. The result was that I had a large file of words that they could not access, so we then tried the obvious. I attempted to persuade their WP department to forsake Multimate by offering to show them how use WordStar, running the copy disk I just happened to have with me. They in turn tried to lever me into learning Multimate, using the copy disk they happened to leave in my possession.

Now, what we are talking about at face value is two pirated copies of word processing software, which is definitely naughty. But, and this is my moral justification, the software industry asks for, even indirectly promotes piracy by its desire for proprietary exclusivity. Rather than work to a common file format so that anyone can access data with whatever WP software they feel happiest with, I am `obliged' to buy Multimate, or they are `obliged' to buy WordStar if this company and I are to communicate effectively.

But is this piracy? Probably it is, but it is a piracy that, I would suggest, both of us have been pushed into attempting. Neither of us has ever thought of distributing or, far worse, selling the `stuff'.

And this, as the letter writer points out, is the one thing that is immoral. "This is wrong, and I can unreseveredly condemn this practice." What is the target, the writer suggests, is the hypocrisy of the computer industry. It has to be said that there have been examples of companies publicly wringing their hands over piracy while privately selling copies of software to which they have no rights.

Is it going too far to suggest, as the writer does, that perhaps the only trustworthy members of the computer fraternity are the `pirates'? At least we know where they are coming from with their boxes of blank and not so blank disks. Maybe we need to have a new word for such people, for it includes most of us at sometime or another.

I also wonder whether the idea of public domain marketing is one way around the problem, where the software comes free, but you buy the documentation and support if you like what you see.

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