Jeffrey Rosen has made some interesting deductions regarding the wildly-successful Humble Indie Bundle project and piracy.
In a new blog post, Rosen calculates (somewhat crudely, he admits) that over 25% of the Bundle downloads are made by pirates. That is to say, people who have not even donated the necessary $0.01 USD.
Quite rightly, he has identified several factors which may account for ‘legitimate’ pirating of the collection. These include somebody making a single large donation and sharing the link to friends without credit cards, and people who live in countries where PayPal, Amazon and Google Checkout may not be accessible payment options.
Even taking these possibilities into account, it still leaves a hefty percentage of people who have pirated a collection of DRM-free games that can be had for $0.01 USD. This raises a few interesting questions about whether piracy can ever be effectively prevented.
Wolfire’s current approach is to not even try.
“When considering any kind of DRM, we have to ask ourselves, “How many legitimate users is it ok to inconvenience in order to reduce piracy?” The answer should be none.” Rosen’s post states.
Despite the estimated piracy, the project has still raised over $825,000 USD at the time of writing.
If you haven’t already, there’s still time to grab the Humble Indie Bundle. And by ‘grab’ we mean ‘make an acceptable donation towards.’
Go on, it even includes Samorost 2 now.
