Jeff Duntemann has a great post on the foolishness of Product Activation.
Activation is to software as DRM is to the music industry. Both serve more to alienate existing customers than to deter pirates. In fact, both can turn today’s loyal customer into tomorrow’s pirate.
Say you buy Acrobat and find it won’t run because you have a RAID array. What do you do? You’ve paid for the software, so you’re entitled to use it. Adobe apparently isn’t going to help you so, arguably, you’re justified in looking for a (cracked) version which will run on your system. Now you know where to find other cracked software, and given that the industry treats you like a criminal, perhaps you might as well act like one…
Similarly, how many people have bought music CDs which won’t play on their computers, and have then turned to peer file sharing systems to find a pirated version which they can actually use. Or people who’ve bought music from DRM services and then struggled to transfer it to a new PC?
This problem is in its infancy, and will get much worse. If the software/music industry regards you with such patent disrespect, there’s going to be little respect flowing the other way. In both cases, the corporations are signing their own death warrants.
Customers will learn to go elsewhere.
Bands and music artists are already realising they don’t need big business to publish their music. They can do it for nothing on the Internet, and retain all the profit. It will only take one really great breakthrough artist to self-publish on the Internet for this trickle to become a flood.
Will the same thing happen in software? Will the best graduate software engineers and computer scientists gravitate to companies which aren’t afraid of the future, who trade solely on the excellence of their products and services? Maybe they’ll even set up their own micro-ISVs. Time will tell.
Much has already been written about the stupidity of DRM. Perhaps the definitive talk was given by Cory Doctorow at Microsoft in June 2004. You’ve probably already seen it - if not, you should take a look.