Piracy is not fair, Neither is Monopoly

Microsoft recently went on an Anti-Piracy drive in Kerala. They have been following a multifaceted policy of learned ignorance, passive warnings and timed & throttled acts of aggression to tackle piracy and to push sales of licenses. I don't condone piracy, neither do I approve monopoly. I would like to explore more on the legality/fairness issues of piracy, monopoly and the relevance of FLOSS in this context.

Let me explain the adjectives used above; Learned ignorance - by allowing piracy to grow in the home user segment and thus use it to open and grow new markets; Passive warnings - by showing funny messages during upgradation or service pack installation; Timed - at reasonably predictable intervals; Throttled - they don't catch everybody.

Developing software is a business. The people employed in the business will have to be paid their due rewards. So software has to be sold and revenues generated from the sales. From this revenue, a share has to be used to pay the salaries, and the rest is rightfully for the owners take. Anybody using a software and not paying for it is effectively denying the right of the producer (the company and its employees) to get a return on their investment(of money and labor). So piracy is not fair. As simple as that.

Piracy is illegal by law in almost all countries. Piracy is equivalent to stealing software and is no different from stealing a bread from a store. Neither can be justified on the basis of the need of the situation. Not only is piracy unfair as discussed above, it is illegal and is not justifiable.

Although I agree theoretically with what is said on simplymalayalees forum, I have reservations about the way the argument is put forward. I run a software company and I agree that people will have to pay for the work done in creating the software. In a normal market when the traded volume of a given product goes up the cost of the product has to come down. It has not happened with Microsoft Windows. The cost has been recovered several times over. What we see here is the effects of the Monopoly Microsoft is enjoying in the market.

Again my opinion is not to legally fight the monopoly or to deny Microsoft the opportunity to make the profit but rather, concerned people should take necessary steps to invigorate the market by introducing alternative options. This is where alternative operating systems like GNU Linux and FreeBSD comes into the picture, and this is precisely what the Linux community is doing.

Microsoft has every right to make a business decision to not reduce the cost of their operating systems below what they are going for currently. If they had perfect competition (in fact any serious competition at all) there wouldn't have been a scenario where they wouldn't have to lower their prices at all. Prices would have been regulated on their own by the free market.

So that must mean that they enjoy some level of monopoly in the market. Microsoft has successfully managed to build their business. They built it so fast and so big that they effectively swamped out all, if any real competition existed, of their competition. Shouldn't they be allowed to reap the rewards of their efforts? Yes. But they should be punished if they had broken any laws of the land along the way.

But monopoly is never good for the market even though it might be very good for the monopolistic company. Monopoly gives the company total control over the prices without any bargaining power for the market. So what should the market do? Demand the monopolistic company to yield to their demands? The market has a much stronger weapon but it has not realized that till now. It is the power of demand. The market has been meekly yielding to the monopoly through cowardly acts of piracy where they promote the monopoly and effectively preventing any kind of competition building up in the market.

So if you feel that Microsoft is manipulating the market and exploiting it using monopoly then rather than complaining, and pirating, you should start using alternative options. As demand builds up for alternatives, companies will spring up to meet this demand and a more vibrant market scenario will appear. Already Linux companies are geared up to take up this challenge, but is the market willing to take the leap?

Gandhiji fought the British East India Company not by raiding their factories or stealing their coffers but by boycotting their products. This is the same strategy that people have to use to revitalize the Operating System market. As a concluding note, if you have the money and you would rather not bear the cost of uncertainty (in the time you have to wait until competition builds up) then you are totally free to go buy your Windows Operating System. Such an act would not be considered an act of cowardice or unfairness