Benefits of piracy for underdeveloped countries

Can our judgment be affected by the country where we live? I think, without any doubts, people will say “yes”. But here is laying another question with great importance. Whose judgment is more correct? One of the issues that are raised between developed and undeveloped countries is adherence to the patents and intellectual property. There are a lot of arguments going from both sides but I will focus only on one of them. Why undeveloped countries do not enforce intellectual property laws? Because piracy support in the long run is more economically profitable for developing a country.

With the fast pace of manufacturing revolution starting at the end of nineteenth century, differences in speed of advancing created need for intellectual property law defense. After about a century of constant development those laws guarantee that authors will get paid for the work that they did. Moreover, one of major requirements for import of intellectual property to undeveloped countries is existence of laws that will protect it from improper use.

Sadly enough there is a huge difference between existence of the law and implementation of the same law. For the countries with young democracy and without highly developed economy piracy, sometimes, is the only answer to the question how to be competitive. For example, Russian Federation, during nineties was the country with low to none respect to the intellectual property. At the same time, same period had the highest rate of engineers invited to developed countries to work. Reasons for that were good education, lower pay rate and familiarity and proficiency with wide variety of programming tools and products. In order to prepare trained specialist, company in developed country were entitled to buy expensive software, provide training and pay more for qualified specialist. People that have been invited to work from Russia were already trained and were asking for much less pay. Definitely this scheme hurts and raises anger from labor force back in developed country but it is more profitable for the given company. At the same time, specialists when they return back to their countries have valuable experience that helps business and economy back in their country. They are becoming middle and upper management familiar with work ethic and guidelines that can help their businesses.

On another hand, there is a huge social difference in income. Let’s consider, for example, cost of license of windows operating system. For developed countries, this is a cost that can be substituted from family budget within two months period without any sacrifices in food, cloth or other basic needs products. In underdeveloped countries, this amount of money for middle class family will be total income of the family for given two months. Moreover, in a lot of cases this might be a total income of the family for the calendar year. In such case, when given an option to buy a license for a full price or to buy a pirated version for a fraction of that, clear winner in this race will be pirated disk.

Nowadays, same examples of achieving success for the cost of others are shown by Republic of China and India. Is there a solution and light in the end of the tunnel? I think there is. Slowly but surely, straggling countries start to develop their own intellectual property and start to stand behind their own authors. But, until this process is wide spread in given countries I don’t think I will see any movements. Due to the fact, that is not beneficial neither to the population, not to the governments.

Comparison of pluses and minuses between free and paid software

There are two main categories of software that available for usual users on today’s market. They are free and proprietary software. Both of those categories include a huge variety of licenses that modifies user interaction with a company on legal field and ability of user to modify, change and distribute software. In order to simplify discussion, let me separate all available software into two general categories: paid one, where you pay immediately or after a period of time usually called “trial period”, and free one, where users have an option to do not pay anything regardless of timeframe of usage. Another important factor will be idea of alternatives, where software can or cannot easily be substituted for an alternative. Let me show some plusses and minuses of both categories in order to simplify decision of choosing software that user might prefer using in his/her life or, possibly, recommending to coworkers, top level managers and businesses.

First and most popular among users is paid category or, in other words, proprietary software. Plusses of this software category are the following:

1. Value. Users are expecting to get some value when they paying for something from their own pocket and in most cases they are.
2. Quality. Usually this is a stable, well developed product with support on basic features of the program.
3. Updates. Includes free updates within one version of the program with bug fixes and new features.
4. Easy of use. Have standard “windows like” interface that is familiar and easy to use or learn and have well written documentation. At the same time it is very easy to find help with this program outside developing company. For example, friends or tech forums on internet accessible with search engines. In most cases, user shouldn’t be tech savvy to install program.

Downsides of the proprietary software are the following:

1. Price. It could be anywhere from “free after mail-in rebates” for simple program to hundreds of thousands dollars for corporate level program.
2. No freedom. Once user choose his/her favorite program it is very hard to switch to alternatives in future when better program is discovered.
3. Features. In most cases of software making business models, whenever major convenient feature is introduced new version of the program is released. It means that users asked to pay one more time in order to get that particular feature. Very high Total Cost of Ownership. In some cases, use of new features requires transition to new data format that will make data incompatible with older versions of the same program.
4. Size and Speed. Common trend is that the higher number version of the program is, size of the program is bigger and speed of execution is slower.
5. High cost of upgrades.

Another category is free software. This largely sector of small program and utilities and, in fact, is alternative to paid category of programs. Main benefits of free software are:

1. Price. Very affordable for any social level of users.

2. Accessibility of developers. If users have any comment or suggestion, developers can easily be reached. In most cases convenient features implemented in reasonable time frame and users should not be large corporate customers to initiate that.

3. Freedom. Easy to switch to alternative program due to wide open data formats support.

4. Free upgrades for the life of the product.

5. Small size and usually high speed of execution even on outdated hardware.

On the other hand free software ahs its own minuses that can’t be ignored or avoided during process of consideration. Main flaws of this category are:

1. Free software comes with little or no support. Even though community around free software is very supportive, in case of rare or special purpose programs it is very hard to get question answered.
2. Quality of free software ranges from outstanding to subpar. Rule of thumb is that with more developers work and support product the better quality is.
3. Hard to use. In most cases users are required to spend time to get familiar with new interface and features in order to use software. Sometimes, this time could be very large.

I hope this description of main software parameters will help average user to make an educated decision. Important thing to keep in mind is that no matter if you get software for free or paid money for it, it should be convenient to use and solve problems effectively.