Media Piracy - Some Thoughts from Someone Who Creates Stuff
I've been making my living by creating content since 1974. That's what I do. Whether it's writing or creating software applications, my living has come from inside of my head. Because of that, I never pirate anything. Ever. Someone creates everything, and that person, like everyone who works at something, deserves payment for that work.
I solve the problem with my writing by writing on contract. I produce the work, and I get paid. Whoever buys that work can worry about the copyright issues. I don't. I either get a fair fee for my work, or I don't do it. That's for writing. That's my policy, and it has worked for me since 1974 for my writing. From magazine articles to books, I work on a contract basis, rather than a royalty basis, always. I tried something else, though, that depended on people's good will and the belief that people would pay for what they used if they found it valuable.
For several years, I had a small software company. I wrote a range of useful applications that filled gaps in what was available as commercial software. Some got great reviews in the computer magazines and were very popular with users. I marketed those applications as shareware, and like a lot of shareware authors, I didn't use limitations on functionality as a means of getting people to pay and register the products.
The result was that about 5% of the people who regularly used the products paid for them. Everyone else just used them. I also developed a shit load of utilities and other programs and just dumped them on the freeware market, using a small splash screen when you closed the program to advertise my shareware applications.
I made about $20K per year from registration fees for my applications. It might have been more if I had limited functionality to get people to register, but I was not in favor of that. I actually believed at the time that the shareware concept would actually work and that people would pay for software they found valuable to them. About 5% did. What did they get for paying? Well, they got a nice printed manual, a copy of the program that didn't ask them to register, and notification of upgrades. They also could contact me for support, but my software worked well and didn't need much support. I tested it thoroughly, and took care of issues immediately when I became aware of them. In 1995, I became the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Association of Shareware Professionals, a trade organization that promoted the shareware software distribution concept.
I closed down the shareware company, though, not long after the Internet became the primary way people shared stuff. Registrations dropped when that happened, and the paid versions of my software started appearing on download sites. Why should anyone pay if they could get the paid version for nothing? The shareware model of software distribution failed with the rise of the Internet. It was that simple.
People stopped paying and I stopped developing applications permanently. Too bad. Once Windows 7 came out, those old programs didn't work any more. I could have updated them, of course, and would have, except that shareware had died. I got calls and emails from people, asking for updates. I had to say no. I couldn't afford to spend the time for no payment. Economically, it didn't make sense any long. So, I don't do that any more, because people stopped paying for what I produced. They still used it, and I could see the download numbers staying strong, but they stopped paying for it.
Want to see what I did? Google OsoSoft Shareware. Some of it is still available, but most don't work well on anything later than XP.
So, I'm back to writing for clients. They tell me what they want. I tell them how much that will cost them. They agree on the amount and I produce what they want. I don't work for free. I can't. I have to eat, pay a mortgage and car payment, etc. So, I do what pays the bills, instead of doing stuff that I'd like to be doing. If nobody pays, it's not happening. It can't.
Except for DU. I write on DU because I'm a political guy. It's my outlet for my own opinions, which have no market value at all. That's cool with me. If I'm not writing stuff for money, I'm usually on DU, writing stuff because I like to write and I believe that writing makes a difference. I'm never paid for my political writing. I wouldn't ever take money for that, because then I'd have to write what someone else wanted me to write.
So, think about it when you bag something without paying. I don't really care if you do, but I stopped doing interesting stuff when people stopped paying for it. Simple, huh?
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The source code is gone. I'm an eclectic coder, and anyone but me would find getting a handle on my code very difficult, to say the least. Everything was done in Visual Basic, through version 3.0. Once Microsoft changed VB to be more Pascal-like, I was at the end of dealing with those applications, and did not bother making the transition and changing the VB source material into the more structured version of VB.
I'm a self-taught programmer, and made much use of global, undeclared variables. For me, it wasn't an issue, since I could carry the entire list of dozens of variables and arrays in my head during coding sessions as I worked. For anyone else, it would be virtually impossible, because the structure evolved as I went. There were dozens of variable arrays, as well, for some of the applications, and versioning was done additively in data files, so maintaining backward compatibility as updates were released involved some creative interpretation of older data files. Very oddball stuff. My error-handling strategies, too, were unique to my programming style. The programs were virtually bug-free in their later versions, and error handling was done in a way that always failed safe, but would be hard to interpret for anyone but myself.
Most people would call my programming style very odd, but it worked very well. VB, through version 3.0 allowed a lot of maneuvering and required some tricks to do things, like displaying and printing graphics. Microsoft, in its questionable wisdom, made those things difficult. I actually created some extensions for graphics scaling and printing that I released into the public domain so that other VB programmers could make use of them. Microsoft finally built functions into VB to do those things, following my reviews of VB in PC World, where I called them out for intentionally limiting VB's graphics handling capabilities. They finally fixed that in VB 4.0.
So, no, I won't be releasing that material, even if it still existed. The old 3.5" floppies that were the backups for it are now unreadable, and I have no interest in dealing with it any longer. It would be useless as open-source software, since VB was changed so dramatically in version 4.0.
Besides, the entire genre has moved on far beyond what I was doing at the time. I started programming at at time when there were many unfilled holes in software functionality, and did most of it to fill needs I discovered, and then expanded my personal stuff into viable shareware applications. Things like creating business cards to print on the newly available sheets of pre-scored business card stock, and an application for label printing that could print anything, including graphics and bar codes on any Avery label product, including a database system to print address labels, instead of using the clumsy mail-merge features in that period's software. To do that, I had to actually create a bar code TrueType font. Another program, Prompter, a Windows-based program for public speakers and television prompters, required the creation a mirror image font and a dictionary-style pronuciation accent font and figuring out a method to display reversed type in Windows. How I did that involved some serious trickery and fancy string array handling. When Microsoft didn't include a useful font management tool in Windows, I created Fonter, which did all the things Microsoft should have done in the first place. That was probably my most popular piece of software, overall. I also wrote a free program, called OKFonts, that could test third-party TTF fonts for errors that crashed Windows, since Microsoft didn't bother to fail-safe its API for defective TTF fonts, which were a real problem and caused hard crashes for Windows. For three years, Microsoft referred its customers to that utility, which was hosted on their servers in their Knowledge Base to deal with people who had problems with corrupt fonts.
My relationship with Microsoft was always one of conflict. As a software reviewer, I frequently called Microsoft to account for issues and missing features with its applications in my reviews. Those generally were corrected in the next version. Occasionally, I'd write VBA routines to implement features in Microsoft Word that should have been included, and make them available to users, always sending a copy to Microsoft Product Managers with a pointed note that asked why such a simple thing had not been done by Microsoft. Those sometimes ended up in the Knowledge Base, too.
At one point, I created a functional parody of Microsoft Bob, called "Bubba," and released it into the public domain. It got international coverage in the press, and was an embarrassment to Microsoft. At one point, more copies of "Bubba" were installed than Microsoft Bob, including on Windows PCs on desks at the Microsoft Campus. That almost cost me my job with the magazine I most frequently wrote for, but I survived. Microsoft Bob did not. I frequently released freeware programs to make up for features that should have been, but were not, included in Windows.
It took Microsoft several versions of Windows before they came up with a useful file management module. So I wrote a freeware program called Filer, that included complete search tools, including searching within files for text, along with global tools for file deletion, file moving, and many other file system functions. Finally, Microsoft added My Computer, to provide some of those functions. It took me a month to create Filer, but I didn't try to sell it. It was just something that was needed, but that wasn't part of Windows.
I'm out of the software business now, and am no longer reviewing computer software. It's not my thing any longer. It was fun, back in the 1980s and 90s, to be sure. But it stopped being fun, so I stopped doing that. That was a long time ago, as computer stuff goes. It was an exciting time, and I got to be part of it. Now, I write content for small business websites, working with a very talented SEO specialist and web designer. I'm good at that, too, and it's a lot easier. 
The first, I wrote some software and signed away the rights to it for an insubstantial amount of money. This software vanished into the "defense" industry and was no longer mine to use for any purpose.
Second (it will take a few paragraphs to explain this) I've pretty much kept everything I've ever written on computers. Whenever I upgrade to a new computer I transfer all my old stuff to it.
My first computer was home-built using an 1802 processor. My next computers were Atari 800. I made some money with Atari 800 and Apple II stuff. Once upon a time I could write 6502 machine language neat, inline code, no assembler, usually embedded in BASIC, Action!, FORTH or some other abstract languages. At the same time I was gaining experience with BSD Unix. (I'm a University of California graduate. I first logged onto the internet in 1979.)
I first signed onto DU using a Windows 98SE computer. But I soon switched to Linux when I discovered Linux would run ALL my old software and open all my old files without much fuss.
I wrote my first and only novel using vi. No problem opening it in Linux.
On my Linux machines all my old computers are one click away. This is not from my current desktop, but similar:
I still own the actual computers, the ROMs, the floppies, the CDs, etc., therefore I figure the emulations are legal. But I've grown wary of starting the actual hardware because I've heard too many electrolytic capacitors popping like firecrackers.
I won't touch proprietary software any more unless someone is paying me and it's something I'm willing to abandon if the situation gets toxic.
All my DU stuff I consider Creative Commons with attribution.
I thought I was seeing: "Media Piracy - Some Thoughts from Someone Who Creates the Stuff" ... and because of my error, when I clicked the link I was already predisposed to having no sympathy for the author, whom I mistakenly thought was identifying himself as a media pirate.
Oops!
Yeah, now I see your point. Good article.
A small group of us (all writers) were just talking about this last night. We 're the following types of writers: one journalist, a legal/real estate writer, and writers of instructional material. One interesting point that was made was that all of us, early in our careers, walked away from the traditional structure for writers because it just didn't work for us.
One person was interviewed at The New Yorker and would have been given the job--except that she didn't meet that last criterion they threw out at the end of the interview: she wasn't independently wealthy. Yes, you heard that right. When she said she could probably survive on their miserly salary, they declined, saying that she would need to go to parties, art showings, and gatherings of other sorts and she would need money for an acceptable wardrobe, cabs, etc. Therefore she did not get the job after all. So what does this tell you about our independent media? Also--this wasn't the only prominent magazine that told her something of this nature. There were a couple others and you would be shocked at the names--except they're no longer publishing.
In my case, I was probably only in my mid-twenties and had an appointment with a NYC editor regarding a freelance article. Other freelance writers were being interviewed, too, and I struck up a conversation with a few of them. I think I walked away from that place without even going in for the interview because based on the types of people in that waiting room, I could see I'd never be a success at this as I was not willing to put up with the C@$#p the others seemed willing to deal with. Also, they were far more aggressive than I was ever going to be. I said to myself that if that's what it took to be a success as a freelance writer, then I wasn't going to be one.
As the years went by, I had many freelance writer friends whose stories about the field confirmed my original choice not to work in that area. Maybe it was selective listening and I just wanted to affirm my decision. I also had numerous deals offered to me. None were ever acceptable in terms of fair compensation.
The bottom line is there never has been and probably never will be a fair compensation system for writing. It's a disgrace because it's hard work. I am one who refuses to do it for that reason.
There are niches where a writer can be highly paid and I've cultivated a few of those areas. Stuff like writing speeches for the presidents of pharmaceutical companies, for example. You know, where you sell your soul along with the speech. 
Seriously, though, I was able to write some speeches and others that called for me to twist my ethics, I walked away from. Marketing communications writers can make in the six figures if they take employment with companies that are high profit. The ethical areas, once again, however, are murky.
Cher