Poser 7, 3D Content, and Piracy
Something that's been on my mind a lot lately as we get very close to the Poser Pro release is the issue of locking the application. Don't worry, no plans at the moment to lock it or protect it. At least not this version. But the pressure to implement some sort of protection is becoming greater and greater. As Torrents and warez sites become more accessible with the massive penetration of broad band access, and the culture of a younger generation of users is increasingly leaning towards software piracy as not only acceptable, but cool, many companies are seeing sales suffer and support requirements go up.
The activation scheme used by Adobe and others is looking more and more appealing to publishers, and is quickly becoming comonplace. As far as the Poser team goes we have a steadfast philosophy that these types of protection schemes tend to only punish the legit users and don't do much to prevent piracy. From a corporate standpoint, not implementing this type of protection is simply lost revenue.
The Poser community has done a great job of policing copyrights and many times we're alerted of illegal warez sites or illegal copies on eBay by members of the community. Turbosquid for example has become notorious for allowing distribution of Poser content owned by e frontier and in almost every case a community member has alerted us. All of this pales in comparison to what's on Bit-torrent or Demonoid. We have a number of Content products available ONLY on Content Paradise that we have released free add-ons for. It's interesting to see the downloads for the free add-ons in some cases triple the number of sales. Search a torrent for any Poser related item, even from RDNA for example, and you'll most likely find it immediately.
So one can hopefully understand how our philosophy of trusting and rewarding the legitimate purchasers is in effect being negated by the corporate philosophy that any piracy is lost revenue. I hope that we don't have to go the route of say an activation scheme but from an insiders point of view, it's an inevitable reality for all software makers that wish to stay in business. Software developers do not come cheap. At least good ones. The costs of packaging, distribution, and infrastructure continue to climb. Taxes worsen and consolidation becomes more and more prevalent in the graphics sector. The behemoths that are Microsoft, Adobe, Autodesk, etc continue to buy up products and technology making it more and more difficult to compete. Exit strategies for start-ups today are much much different that they were even 10 years ago and the out of the gate idea of building a company and technology to be sold to one of several target acquirers has become the norm. It's almost impossible to compete with these companies. Piracy for a small company or a start-up not only adds to those woes, but can seal a companies fate very early on.
I will never advocate invasive and obtrusive protection schemes, but I'm worried that they are quickly becoming a necessary evil.
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Feeed-mE! 
I do like that you "will never advocate invasive and obtrusive protection schemes", as for me they spell the end of the road for any software that uses such.
I buy the software I use and have my employers buy the software I use at work. Heck, I even pay my sharewares! I have nothing against serial numbers, but to me activation is a casus belli. I have stopped upgrading Adobe products, and Maplesoft products because of it. I will not upgrade a spelling checker because of it. I did not have to upgrade to Poser 5 while that dastardly scheme was briefly implemented, because I am on a mac and there was no Poser 5 for the mac at that time, so that doesn't count :-)
Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that I participate in free software... But at any rate, don't let the suits go amok with their intended madness!
This is a tough one. As a creative person, I'm as much against misuse of other people's hard work as I am of my own (I give the stuff away, on very generous terms, and *still* people abuse them!) I do alert copyright holders to unauthorised redistribution whenever I find it.
However protection schemes that harm the legitimate user are bad too. I've been bitten this way in the past. An audio product I used to use had an online verification scheme, which was fine while it worked (although not everybody wants their main work machine connected to the Internet at all). Then the company was bought out by a corporate monolith and the verification server disappeared. When my disk failed and I needed to reinstall, I couldn't. Fortunately I managed to find an open source alternative: not quite as nice, but far better in my mind than paying for an upgrade I didn't want, nor should have needed.
I would be unlikely to buy another product that had a similar scheme attached. I've avoided Windows XP too - yes, I know Microsoft *is* a corporate monolith, and is unlikely to disappear; but any company that says to its users "we don't trust you" before they've even had a chance to use the product has the wrong attitude, in my opinion.
Not surprisingly, the software companies, that use heavy copy protection schemes, haven't lowered their software prices even though those schemes supposedly were supposed to save them billions of dollars in lost revenues. That means that the protection either didn't work or, if it did, the companies aren't passing the savings on to consumers, or maybe a little of both.
Try doing a Torrent search for the products that have the activation feature and they're still being disseminated with cracks.
In the end, the activation is probably more to force software buyers to provide personal information to the company for marketing purposes than anything else. If there is only going to be a downside to legally purchasing software, what will purchasers do in the future?
Unfortunately, a lot of software companies pin their survival on upgrades to popular software instead of on new programs or expansion modules to their programs. They add a few percent more functionality to new versions, fix some bugs that will never be patched in older versions, often make saved files with new versions incompatible with earlier ones, and then charge 50% or more of the price to their customer base. I once calculated what it would cost me to upgrade all my software to the latest versions and the price tag was thousands of dollars. Guess how special that makes me feel as a buying customer?
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