Software Piracy Exposed: Secrets from the Dark Side Revealed
reviewed by Robert Pritchett
Authors: Paul Craig, http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/catalog/view/au/1386 Ron Honick, http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/catalog/view/au/1997 Mark Burnett, Booksite: http://www.syngress.com/catalog/?pid=3230 $40 USD, $56 CND, £23 GBP, 35€ EUR also as an E-Book - http://www.syngress.com/catalog/?pid=3235 Published: September 2005. Pages: 400 ISBN: 1932266984 Requirements: A desire to look at the “Dark Side” of computing. Strengths: Weaknesses: Bad language, give this book an R-Rating. And more than a few typos and technical errors make this book look like a “pre-publish” print. |
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Software Piracy Exposed: Secrets from the Dark Side Revealed by Paul Craig, Ron Honick and Mark Burnett offers an exposé on the steamier and seamier dark side of the Internet and appears also to be shoddy, unprofessional, rushed, unedited and is printed from the same paper as dime-store novels. Even the ink smells!
Perhaps the authors spent too much time in the warez environment and not enough time proofing their work. As an editor, I would have expunged all the 4-letter cuss words to keep this book from being tossed outright by folks that don’t care to be bashed in the eyeballs with such trash talk. Or maybe that was part of the plan to publish this book “as-is” all along? If your sensibilities had been offended by the content in the first part of the book, than you would have dropped it like a hot rock and moved on, not noticing the few grains of wheat amongst so much chaff.
The book, instead of being presented as an authority on the topic comes off as a shallow approach to the piracy topic.
The book doesn’t so much expose us to the soft underbelly of software piracy but rather lets us see the authors with their pants down around their ankles.
And they seem apparently totally unrepentant about pirating anything. After buying this book, you just might feel that you were robbed too.
The dongle content dangles. An expert needed to provide input on those instead of the way the issue is presented as some much dancing around the topic instead of taking it head-on.
By now, you should know that we ding publishers for typos and for bad language.
The book comes across as an apologist for bad behavior. The interspersed Piracy Facts sidebars seem to be mostly correct. The Summary on Appendix A end saying that this book is not a book about morality, stating that it is instead an exposé showing how widespread the problem is, why and how it is done and how it is being stopped.
Note: If any publisher wants a better review, they need to address those short-comings up front.
So is this review a little harsh? Well, yeah, but I really expected more and so should you.
If I had written the book, I would have put the chapter on Piracy and the Law up front, showing which laws are broken, what the penalties are for pirating software and which “scenes” got taken down by justice departments and security forces. Then go into who did what, when.
There are 11 chapters and 4 Appendices. The cover an inside look of the “scene”, how it began, suppliers, crackers, site rules and types of sites, the distribution chain, the areas that piracy focuses on, the law and future of piracy and a couple of pages of closing notes. The Appendices cover piracy justification, hazards, solutions and tools an dhow to fight back.
I found that probably the sweet spot for not pirating software is where Steve Jobs has placed it at $2 USD for video and $1 USD for music. And if more software firms offered demo versions of their products there would be less “need” to pirate their wares – unless of course, they prefer “viral marketing”.
What is most “revealing” is that practically all piracy is done from “inside” by folks who should know better than to expose their firms to too early releases and opening their apps to the competition. An other way Apple has been out front is that they offer most of their source code to anyone who really wants to look at it. Again, if more firms did that, there would once again be “no need” for piracy.
One thing I learned was that warez for the Mac came much later than for the Windows and Linux environments – probably because there was no “need”, really. I found that both refreshing and revealing. Don’t you?
