I have always been a staunch opponent of software piracy,
but sometimes you hear stories that make you question your own ethics. Such was
a coffee shop encounter with a casual acquaintance I will call ‘Jim’. The
coffee was a sort of confessional as Jim had just become a software pirate,
quite late in life. Jim’s story went something like this:
He needed a copy of Photoshop made by Adobe. He went to
their website and found that it would cost him US$699 (NZ$875). A little steep,
he thought but, if that was the price, he was willing to pay. But before doing
so he thought he would check pricing elsewhere and found that Amazon had it for
sale at US$585 (NZ$785). Sweet, he thought, and pressed Amazon’s ‘One click’ to
purchase. Unfortunately, Amazon said they could only download the software to
customers in the US. Dam. Why?
Back to the Adobe Store he went, with credit card in hand to
pay the full whack of US$699 but his transaction was refused – because he lived
in New Zealand. Uh? Adobe directed Jim
to their New Zealand store – where he was told that a copy of CS6 would cost
him AU$1,062. Now 1,062 Australian dollars was going to set Jim back about NZ$1,400
a far cry from the NZ$785 that the Amazon shop would have charged or even the
NZ$875 that Adobe would have charged in the US store. WTF?
It seems that Jim had stumbled across the price gouging
practices that Adobe employ outside the US. Adobe claim that it’s justified
because of the cost of doing business in those countries. But Jim just wanted a
download and there’s no way that would cost Adobe more in New Zealand than it
does in the US.
Jim was incensed. Incensed enough to spend a few hours
trawling the web, reading about Adobe’s pricing practices and coming to the
conclusion that they are nothing short of unethical. Jim was also incensed enough to find out what
a ‘torrent’ was and how he could download an unlicensed copy of Photoshop. And
this was someone who regularly paid voluntary donations to developers of ‘free’
software that he liked.
As I look back on that conversation, it amazes me what
happened that day; Firstly, Abobe and its agents (Amazon in this case) turned
away a buyer who was willing to pay US$699 dollars - the same price any American
would be charged. They did this because
Jim was a New Zealander (or at least not an American). Americans are charged NZ$875,
New Zealanders NZ$1,400 for exactly the same product – that’s rampant and
unjustifiable discrimination.
The second thing that happened was that an
otherwise honest man became a software pirate because, in his mind, if it was
good enough for Adobe to rip him off then Adobe just made themselves fair game
in the rip off stakes.
It’s a sad tale on many levels, but it made me wonder how
many pirates there are that would pay the price - if the price was fair? I own
two fully licensed Adobe products but I’ll certainly be looking much more carefully
at the pricing next time around. Perhaps you should too.
