[stutsmansoft]

No effect? My own experience differs.

I had an iOS product that was doing well, and it had some DRM to prevent jailbreakers.

I had a legitimate buyer complain and after soul-searching I removed the DRM.

Sales immediately dropped to near zero and never recovered.

So at least in my experience, piracy affected sales.

[devwastaken]

Piracy affects smaller companies far more than large ones, and that's where the discussion gets muddied.

In my view we don't talk about product protection enough, and instead resort to dunking on DRM all the time. Instead of talking about DRM and how it is legitimately problematic I'd like to highlight that we can protect products without DRM and still sell them - it's why products have gone to online accounts for seemingly offline software.

Of course this can be broken, the same as DRM, but done right online features can become a core part of a software and make it so offline patches remove a significant enough amount of feature that it's not worth it.

It is sadly a natural order of things. In my experience when I was younger I legitimately could not have gotten into graphic design and learned enough about it without the big name products. The pricing for something like adobe has become so far outside of reason that people will pay for the crack rather than the subscription as an example.

[freedomben]

> it's why products have gone to online accounts for seemingly offline software.

Very interesting theory. My theory so far has been that it's been because:

1. Data mining/data accumulation/data reselling

2. For so many devs web is what they know, so they naturally think in those terms

3. You can release updates/new versions way, way faster if much of the app is on your server

4. Future flexibility

I definitely think your theory belongs on the list. I'm wondering how impactful that is. Could be pretty big.

[native_samples]

I think it's pretty impactful but people don't like to talk about it or even think about it explicitly. Rather, what people observe is that the really rich companies seem to mostly make their money by selling online services or like Apple, by selling hardware. As the latter is very difficult and often unjustifiable for what could be a pure software solution, people just come to associate cloud service=success and it the underlying factors become under-analyzed.

I think they also realize that whilst geeks will kick up a stink about "DRM" when it's done client side, the exact same thing implemented by a firewall and server rules draws no attention. So it's seen as more socially respectable, although in reality of course, software+DRM gives much better privacy than a cloud service ever can.

In reality of course, lots of very rich companies make offline or mostly offline software. Microsoft, Oracle, SAP etc. But they're unfashionable.

[szundi]

That would mean that it was only used by jailbroken iDevices?

[viktorcode]

Not necessarily. Jailbroken device is needed to produce decrypted dump which is packaged back into an application file. This file then can be signed with a third party service using either an enterprise account or the personal user account (in which case it must be re-signed periodically).

[Shared404]

I could see that being the case if it was a power user focused app.

[bombcar]

I think that’s a major thing - piracy of Disney or Adobe may be minor, but piracy of a small app could entirely destroy it. Especially one in a targeted niche.

[Nextgrid]

Out of curiosity, what was the product? Was it targeted at home/personal users or business users? I would expect piracy to be less of a problem for products targeted at business use, where occasional piracy by home users is less of a problem as they usually wouldn't be able to afford/justify paying for the software anyway (piracy might help in these cases - training people that will then become paying users in the future).

[wswope]

Looks to be a DVR remote app aimed at home consumers. Was going to call BS on the post originally, but the app was from the 2008/2009 era, which makes way more sense (nowhere near enough people are jailbroken for this to happen nowadays). Kinda BM to leave out that detail IMO.

[native_samples]

Why is it problematic (BM?) to leave out that detail? It's irrelevant to the argument TechDirt is making, which is a general one.

All the date means is that when the iPhone platform had poorly implemented DRM, piracy rates could approach nearly 100% for some types of app. Since then Apple improved their DRM and nowadays iOS devs don't worry about piracy so much. Seems like a disproof of TechDirt's thesis.

[stutsmansoft]

Correct, that was the app. It did reasonably well and tanked to near-nothing when DRM was removed, and to full nothing when TiVo finally released their own.

[amelius]

What price was it sold for?

[Veuxdo]

Why does it matter?

[freedomben]

I quit pirating years ago when I started being able to pay for things. Just speaking for myself, price matters a lot. Nowadays if things are overpriced I just don't use them. But I didn't used to have the luxury of deciding what to use. Often I was forced to use a specific tool (such as Photoshop). If it was priced well I would pay. If not, I would pirate. The only exception here was movies because I've always despised the unreliability and terrible user experience of optical media.

[cgriswald]

Does curiosity need justification?

> Overall,the analysis indicates that for films and TV-series current prices are higher than 80 per cent of the illegal downloaders and streamers are willing to pay. For books, music and games prices are at a level broadly corresponding to the willingness to pay of illegal downloaders and streamers.

It would be interesting to know to what degree price is a factor in app piracy.

[michaelmrose]

Piracy could be partially regarded as a pricing problem. If your album is priced at $1000 and you sell 3 albums and get 1000 pirated downloads and you focus on the 1000 people who didn't pay you then you are focusing on the wrong problem.

The important thing even more so than what price would have inspired the 1000 to pay you is the 10,000 who didn't even consider your product and what price would have changed that decision.

[andrewmcwatters]

Thank you for sharing your experience. Studies like this may produce some general truth at large for a segment of a market, but they're hardly representative of reality.

I've also released software which was good enough that people wanted to pirate it. I think it's a lesson you don't have to learn once on your own: it's enough to hear other people's accounts.

[michaelmrose]

0.4% of Iphones are jailbroken. Let us suppose that 50% of individuals with jailbroken phones who were prospective buyers decided to download it instead a fantastic unbelievable percentage. You would expect a 0.2% decrease in sales.

What you are describing is aprox 500x the effect. Your hypothesis is fantastic let me propose some alternatives.

- The same release that removed the DRM also introduced changes in the application which you didn't regard as in any way negative but which turned off users.

- You introduced changes in your price structure to account for the rampant piracy you expected and killed your sales.

- You in some way offended people and they decided to stop buying from you.

- You serve a niche and either saturated that niche, the portion of the niche that was interested in your solution, or the portion of the second group your advertising was reaching and sales dropped off

- You have an exposure problem. You experienced a positive but not permanent bounce that only coincided incidentally with removal of DRM

- Other players entered the same space diluting your market

Any of the above are more reasonable than supposing that all your users are jailbreakers.

[wswope]

No, I was similarly skeptical at first because modern jailbreaking is so rare. He’s telling a true story… but leaving off that his story was from the 2008/2009 era.

https://www.tivocommunity.com/threads/iphone-app-dvr-remote....

[michaelmrose]

Maybe the actual story is about the rising competition from cable co provided DVRs in an excellent position to roll their hardware into the customers existing bill for a perceptively smaller fee compared to outright purchase of superior tivo hardware combined with increasing competition from streaming services.

User has understandably negative feelings about piracy and retroactive explains his misfortune based on it.

[native_samples]

You're quite in denial here. User's story is true, and as he explained the effect was "overnight". You're trying to claim that an effect that happened instantly, the moment he removed the DRM, is to do with long term industry trends. But that wouldn't happen instantly.

It's pretty obvious that well implemented DRM works. If it didn't then it would have died out a long time ago. See how much effort the games console makers put in, despite it being a highly competitive market with extreme pricing pressure. Yet, they do compete on the quality of their DRM because game studies are responsive to it.

[michaelmrose]

I was being kind and not disparaging the commenter. User is misrepresenting the truth.

1 out of 250 iphones is jailbroken and can even install pirated apps directly. On balance which is more likely that piracy killed his app overnight or netflix, competitors, and cable co DVRs did?

The alternative is to have us believe that nearly all his prospective users were in the 0.4% and instantly heard it on the grape vine that his app was fair game "overnight" instead of buying a $3 remote app. Does that seem even slightly credible?

It makes a better narrative than I bet my livelihood on a excellent entrant to a market that became crowded then went away.

If you do a search restricted to the time frame his product died you will note there were multiple competitors including a mobile interface m.tivo.com launched.

[stutsmansoft]

I was able to dig up the sales report.

https://imgur.com/a/xE9UG1B

[stutsmansoft]

All those factors are plausible. If I can still get sales reports I will see if I can re-identify the dropoff and look for correlation.

I will say it certainly -felt- like removing the DRM was a mistake at the time, because the cliff was dramatic and immediate.

As others have pointed out this was a product in the 2009 era, and it did eventually get replaced by a first-party app from TiVo at which point I just shut it down.

[ReaLNero]

What DRM did you use? Is there a plug-and-play solution, or did you have to hand-roll the DRM?

[stutsmansoft]

It was an off-the-shelf jailbreak solution, and I sprinkled it in over 100 places in the code. I read people on jailbreak forums expressing frustration that my app was "too hard to crack and not worth it." Success!

But once it backfired and affected a single paying customer, I decided to change my course.

[ativzzz]

This is why there are so many new products that are SaaS. Built in "feature" of requiring an account so DRM is just a given and recurring revenue.