How to stop Piracy?

Several days ago, I got one call from my under-classmate in Notre Dame. Now he worked as the sales director in one famous design software company. He asked me about the electronic design industry in China. He told me that everyone knows that China is a huge market but most company hesitates to enter China market due to piracy.

Everyone knows that piracy has a significant impact on the high-tech industry, resulting in lost jobs, decreased innovation and higher costs. As a Chinese who has been working in USA for more than 10 yrs, I understand his worry and I also believe Chinese government has realized this. But it seems a mission impossible to stop piracy in a country like China. But could anyone tell me what's the best way to solve the piracy problem?

Any advice will be greatly appreciated!

Thank you in advance!

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I don't think it's piracy itself so much as the legal system now *recognizing* piracy (and other intellectual property "issues") as much of a crime until rather recently.

I suppose that depends on how you define "significant." You can never prove how many pirated copies of some piece of software would have translated into real revenue if piracy were impossible, so the best anyone can do is to make rather broad estimates of the impacts of piracy. Some people will even argue that software piracy helps long-term product sales as piracy becomes a form of "advertising" and most people who do have the money to purchase the product will then actually do so... but this too relies on an awful lot of suppositions and strikes me as pretty much impossible to prove in any meaningful context.

There are plenty of tangible (and measurable) costs associated with implementing copy protection and end-users being forced to comply with it; these are not insignificant.

I don't think anyone can tell you that -- although Googling "software piracy prevention" will turn up a lot of hits! At least here in the U.S., once you have a decent legal system in place to make piracy a crime, it's been up to individual companies and private trade groups to seek out and prosecute pirates. In many cases it's disgruntled former employees who turn in their (former!) companies for widescale piracy.

One good way to prevent piracy is to get into the hardware business rather than just the software business: Hardware designs are readily made much harder to copy than software.

---Joel Kolstad