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Piracy Software Apple

Apple Converting Trial and Pirated iWork, iLife and Aperture To Full Versions 134

Posted by Soulskill from the defensive-indifference dept.
tlhIngan writes "One aspect about the new OS X Mavericks release was that all Apple produced software was to be downloadable and updatable through the Mac App Store. However, this raises the obvious question: what happens to users who bought the software beforehand? Initial reports showed that the Mac App Store scanned your hard drive for software and offered to associate it with your Apple ID. The scans even found trial and pirated versions and upgraded those to fully-licensed versions. Even more interestingly, this is not a bug, and it appears Apple is turning a blind eye to the practice, giving away copies of iLife, iWork and Aperture to users who own trial or even pirated versions of the apps. Apple has also recently stopped providing downloadable trial versions of iLife, iWork and Aperture from their web site."
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Apple Converting Trial and Pirated iWork, iLife and Aperture To Full Versions More

Apple Converting Trial and Pirated iWork, iLife and Aperture To Full Versions

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  • Identity Play (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    its associated with your corporate ID - apparently more valuable that the person-years it takes to write the software. Why is your identity so valuable ?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by brxndxn ( 461473 )

      They can sell that information to the government that will pay for it with our tax dollars!

      maybe

    • Re:Identity Play (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jythie ( 914043 ) on Friday October 25, 2013 @02:24PM (#45238691)
      It could be less about the value of your ID, and more about trying to get people into the fold. Not only would this likely simplify the development and testing (thus decrease the cost of deployment) but it could generate some good will and keep people using the Apple stack. And since Apple is more a hardware and media company then a software one, getting people to pay for their software is probably a relatively low priority, esp when it might be in conflict with the other two major ones.
    • Sounding a little tin-foil there... The way I see it, Microsoft has been burned repeatedly by their activation servers returning false positives and identifying legit software as pirated. Apple's biggest marketing claim is "it just works", so they really want to avoid that sort of negative publicity. On top of that, there's the administrative cost of dealing with customer claims. How much staff time would be required to deal with complaints and update records? Letting the pirates off the hook, and gifting

  • When can I buy an OS for a future "hackintosh" that I might build?

    • Probably never.

    • Apple is now providing it for free. Do the people who bought it get refunds?

      You can't, it's free also. Why would you want to pay more than nothing?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 )

      you can't so you can't argue that you paid for it.

    • Re: Ok then (Score:5, Insightful)

      by thetoadwarrior ( 1268702 ) on Friday October 25, 2013 @02:18PM (#45238623) Homepage
      Apple is a hardware company and now don't make money on OSes not sold with the hardware so what makes you think they'd want to shoot themselves in the foot? You can install what you want on a mac but osx is mac simply because they just want to sell hardware. If you want freely installable unix software use Linux. There's nothing wrong with it.

    • Re: (Score:1, Offtopic)

      by MisterSquid ( 231834 )

      PayPal $299.99 to apple.com@mistersquid.com making sure to include your

      • Name
      • Shipping Address
      • Social Security or Tax Identification #
      • Mother's maiden name
      • Date of Birth
      • City of Birth

      and I... I mean APPLE (ahem) will mail you a Blu-Ray version of Mavericks for VIPs.*

      *caveat emptor. Offer subject to limitations and conditions which I will not reveal to you unless, well, yeah never.

  • Not a Dick Move (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DexterIsADog ( 2954149 ) on Friday October 25, 2013 @01:29PM (#45237943)
    Good job, Apple. This will likely increase revenue from some of those whom you make legit, and will warm the hearts of some who, like me, despise all things Apple. Well, a little less today.

    • Good job, Apple.

      So... rewarding piracy is what makes a good company? Not sure I agree with that. The loss in sales is most likely offset in product pricing (you're paying more because of those who leech).

      • Read the relevant article. Also, if they are already giving away the latest iWork and iLife suites, what's the point of having some of your users with older and possibly vulnerable versions?

        • You don't have to worry about Aperature trial being venerable in Mavericks. The trial flat out won't even launch. That's the ultimate form of security there.
      • No - like I said in my very brief post, converting people into legitimate customers, who are more likely to start, or keep buying is what makes a good company.

        Reading comprehension!

      • What lost sales? they wouldn't got that money in the first place ! I applaud the move. You got a pirated application that you really use. Now you are bind to them. And for every update that cost a little you will have to pay. So they could in theory get some money (back) from a non (and never would) paying pirate^^^^^^ person.
        In the process they get to know how much of their applications gets pirated versus legitimate copies. They probably get stats from the hardware used other related stuff like software,

      • There is no loss in sales. The people who didn't buy it were never going to.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by torkus ( 1133985 )

        Not necessarily.

        Back in the 90's there were several competing office suites. MS Office was one of the easiest to 'steal' (111-1111111 if anyone remembers) which led to a massive piracy^^^^^^adoption by home users. MS cut breaks for businesses on top of that so businesses adopted it...soon enough it was just the go-to standard. Everyone had a bootleg copy and that's what they knew.

        Piracy drove adoption and sales. MS Office is still MS's biggest cash cow afaik.

        Let Apple do the same ... some people are goi

    • Also, it will get more people to use Apple software, hence, reducing changes of those users moving to another OS.

  • Brilliant (Score:5, Interesting)

    by deathcloset ( 626704 ) on Friday October 25, 2013 @01:42PM (#45238145) Journal

    Embrace, Extend, Extinguish: Piracy Edition (Piracy being assumed as the natural, efficient and convenient way to get software over the internet). It's working for Adobe, despite glacial user acceptance and strong vociferous opposition.

    Step 1) entering product categories involving widely used standards: In this case we look at the "product category" as "minimal effort and cost software downloads" - what everyone lovingly calls digital piracy.

    Step 2) extending those standards with proprietary capabilities: Beat-out the pirates on even the 'minimal effort' part by not requiring a crack, key or navigation of noisy comments for affirmation of operation/safety and worry of nested nasty bits in your bytes. Also the cost is actually less, since it's free of money and of questionable legitimacy.

    Step 3) using those differences to disadvantage its competitors: No more trial downloads to easily crack, deeper mechanisms for software updates coupled with the ability to release consitent and constant updates which actually contain scoped functionality thereby daunting the crackers and hackers with new security mechanisms and version hell which results in a saturation of the pirate space with even more questionable softwares with varying levels of functionality/stability thus severly diminishing the causual pirate's desire and ability to identify and use the software they wish.

    Brilliant. It works. Now I have to pay ;) (I, personally, have a personal moral stance which makes me inevitably wind up paying for, conservatively, %50 of the software I download - because it is the software I actually like or use and YES, believe it or not I actually want to pay programmers to write stuff!).

    Still, it seems like there is another shoe to drop here. Now to read everyone else's comments for that shoe.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by ColdWetDog ( 752185 )

      The weird bit is Aperture. And not Final Cut X (apparently, FTFA). Aperture has been billed as the 'pro' photography app although it's a bit of a lightweight compared with Adobe (may their souls rot in a maggot infested camel turd) offerings. Likewise Final Cut X - although it acts more like a prosumer app than the previous versions of Final Cut and doesn't do half what Premiere Pro / After Effects does (nor does it cost as much).

      If Apple opens up Final Cut to this system, then it's pretty clear that App

      • I've never liked any of the Apple apps.

        I'm guessing you never used Final Cut Pro before X. I will be sticking with that until it's long past obsolete.

        • Yep. Been there and done that. I know some people like it but I'll be damned if I can figure out why. When you want it to automate something, you can't. When you want to do something manually, you can't.

          Different strokes, I suppose.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        The weird bit is Aperture. And not Final Cut X (apparently, FTFA). Aperture has been billed as the 'pro' photography app although it's a bit of a lightweight compared with Adobe (may their souls rot in a maggot infested camel turd) offerings. Likewise Final Cut X - although it acts more like a prosumer app than the previous versions of Final Cut and doesn't do half what Premiere Pro / After Effects does (nor does it cost as much).

        If Apple opens up Final Cut to this system, then it's pretty clear that Apple

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Lumpy ( 12016 )

        "although it acts more like a prosumer app than the previous versions of Final Cut and doesn't do half what Premiere Pro / After Effects does"

        Oh god that is funny. Premier pro is a JOKE in the pro video world, the only people that use it are wedding videographers and kiddies on youtube. The current Final Cut is back to what Final cut 8/9 was like but with a lot of good stuff added.

        a LOT of TV shows are edited in Avid, Vegas, and Final Cut, ZERO are edited on Premiere Pro. Premiere Pros Color corrector

    • Yes. My first reaction to seeing that Maverick was free was to ask myself why, and why make a song and dance about it? I haven't updated my macbook pro with this yet because I had this uncomfortable feeling. Now I read that they are giving an amnesty to pirated software but will in future require all software to come through the App Store. Well that rings a bell. That was the strategy MS took with Windows, first they let people pirate it then when everyone was dependent on it they used the activation strate

  • Win8 upgrade did the same. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Holammer ( 1217422 ) on Friday October 25, 2013 @01:43PM (#45238157)

    I bought Win8 using a pirated Win7. I suspect MS turned a blind eye as well, as my poorly cracked copy constantly nagged about being counterfeit software etc.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Microsoft has never really cared about pirated software. They seem to be one of the only companies that actually gets that it's impossible to stop piracy, so you shouldn't waste time bothering. The worst they do is to display a little nagware notice on a black desktop to say that the software isn't "genuine". They don't prevent you from accessing your files or running things. Prior to Windows 95, MS-DOS didn't even have any copy protection checks or license keys. Considering how many PCs run their products,

      • Re:Win8 upgrade did the same. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by CitizenCain ( 1209428 ) on Friday October 25, 2013 @02:44PM (#45238917)

        You don't have that quite right.

        Microsoft's licensing model is such that they make vastly more from OEM and corporate sales than from end-consumer OS purchases. It's not that they don't care about piracy, (remember all that shit around activating Vista and 7, and WGA causing problems for legit users?) it's more that the sliver of income they get from consumer OS purchases isn't worth devoting resources to protect from piracy.

        • (remember all that shit around activating Vista and 7, and WGA causing problems for legit users?)

          What, isn't it the same for 8 (I haven't used 8 yet, so I haven't had a chance to notice)?

  • iTunes Match (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 25, 2013 @01:51PM (#45238293)

    Same sort of thing happened with iTunes match. It scans your whole music library (legal or otherwise) and gives you high bit rate versions of all your tracks in the cloud (and available to download permanently, even if you don't renew).

  • iWork isn't bad for home use... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ducomputergeek ( 595742 ) on Friday October 25, 2013 @01:53PM (#45238307)

    I sold my last company in 2010. I bought a new MacBook Pro and decided to get iWork as it was far cheaper than Office. I needed to write a formal letter here and there, keep track of Farm expenses on a spreadsheet, and create presentations for start ups I was mentoring at a local technology incubator. Only thing that annoyed me slightly was having to buy the programs again for iOS. I felt if I bought them for mac they should have offered the iOS versions as part of the price.

    Well then one of the companies I was mentoring started to take off and it went from mentoring to consulting to now being offered an executive position with the company. They were all Mac users as well, but that's when we found the problem with iWork. While documents synced between our own devices, Apple doesn't offer iCloud for small businesses where we could all sync to a company drive. Ironically to solve this we went to Microsoft SkyDrive and then eventually to Office365.

    I still use iWork, especially Keynote for developing internal reports & presentations. As bad as this may sound, it's because I have a water proof case for my iPad and it's in my shower. That's where I often have my best ideas and it's handy to write them down, or go threw a presentation or write a todo list.

    Where this is nice is for my Dad who now gets an office suite free with the latest version of the OS that will do everything he needs.

  • If only I were less organized! (Score:3)

    by Holladon ( 1620389 ) on Friday October 25, 2013 @02:04PM (#45238427)
    Dammit -- now I regret deleting the trial version after my trial period expired. Why oh why did I care about the disk space?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jmauro ( 32523 )

      You can just download them for free now from the App Store.

    • What's the problem? iWork and iLife suites are free now. Or do you mean Aperture?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Predius ( 560344 )

        Not according to the Apple App Store as of this moment. Pages, Keynote and Numbers are all $19.95.

        • Reading the press release (http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2013/10/23Apple-Introduces-Next-Generation-iWork-and-iLife-Apps-for-OS-X-and-iOS.html), I'd guess you need to be running Mavericks to get the free versions.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Predius ( 560344 )

            I am. They're only free if you had some version before. If you've never bought them, you still have to pony up full retail.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by jo_ham ( 604554 )

        They're free if you have a trial, legacy or pirate version on your system. If you don't have any of those, then the store prompts you to buy them. They are bundled free with new Macs though, and up until this announcement they were available as trial downloads from Apple, so most Apple customers probably have at least one of those options.

        • My Air is new as of July, updated to Mavericks last week. I assume that isn't new enough, as I have none of the referenced software, and the App store wants to charge me for them.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jo_ham ( 604554 )

            Call Apple, since you absolutely should have older copies of iWork and iLife on there. A Haswell Air is definitely in the included set of machines.

            • Hmmm. Any chance you have a handy source I could refer to before I call them to explain that I'm requesting the software because someone on the internet told me I'm entitled to it? ;-) No disrespect whatsoever intended, I certainly do appreciate the well-intentioned info.

      • Aperture was the one I cared about, yeah.

        ::sadface::

  • This was a pleasant surprise (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sjgman9 ( 456705 ) on Friday October 25, 2013 @02:09PM (#45238477)

    I bought iWork 09 several years ago (before the app store existed) and was surprised to see it upgraded on one of my laptops!
    Thanks Apple!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by narcc ( 412956 )

      A surprise update like that could be a bad thing, if you had some reason to have an older version of the software installed.

  • Of course (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mosb1000 ( 710161 ) <mosb1000@mac.com> on Friday October 25, 2013 @02:13PM (#45238533)

    If you have it, then you're using a mac one way or another. They want you using the latest software. The more people who use it the more benefit they get in terms mac or iDevice sales. They've already spent the money writing the software so they can sell more hardware. There is practically no marginal cost for distributing it.

  • Excellent! (Score:3)

    by Denis Lemire ( 27713 ) on Friday October 25, 2013 @02:13PM (#45238537) Homepage

    I originally purchased iWork '09 via boxed media... When the App Store started distributing the individual apps, I preferred this for the convenience of downloading vs inserting a disc like a caveman.

    Eventually I ended up re-purchasing Pages and Numbers for this convenience but have not forked over the dollars for Keynote as of yet... With this recent change, I dusted off my iWork disc and made the leap to the App Store version of Keynote for free.

    It's always refreshing when paying customers aren't assumed to be thieves.

  • My God!!! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Identita ( 1256932 ) on Friday October 25, 2013 @02:13PM (#45238541) Homepage
    One company finally gets it!!!

  • Not that new (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I was running a pirated copy of iWork on one of my machines a few years ago when I noticed Apple software update recognized it as genuine, leading me to believe Apple has actually been doing this for some time.

  • This is not what the FSF meant when they said free software

  • iWork '13 is crippled (Score:5, Informative)

    by GrahamCox ( 741991 ) on Friday October 25, 2013 @02:58PM (#45239073) Homepage
    Beware about jumping on this too soon. iWork '13 on the Mac has many features *FEWER* than the previous version, to bring it more in line with the iOS version. A lot of people seem pretty annoyed by this, and who can blame them? I guess the good news is that the older version is moved aside, not deleted by the upgrade.

  • Nice!
    I upgraded to Mavericks the day it came out (I know, risky move but so far, very impressed... especially memory management and battery life).
    I just checked the App store for iMovie on my older MacBook Air and it offered me a free update of the "09" version which came with my machine.
    iMovie is just about the only Apple software which I really like and use a lot so I'm happy to have the update.

  • It's a smart move because you don't want to alienate your possible customers. Either the pirates will buy your stuff in the future or they won't ever. Giving them a copy of the software that they already pirated doesn't cost Apple anything.

  • Is there a way to remove these? Apple is tracking us with this as a DRM. So, we can't even share our downloaded apps (e.g., Mac OS X installers) onto other computers. :(

  • Microsoft turned a blind eye years ago when people were pirating DOS and Windows 3.1 and later 3.11...and even to some extent Windows 95....though they made it harder and not so obvious, so that the average rube wouldn't know how, but it used to be a simple matter of using all 0000-0000-0000-0000-0000 and that was your installation code for Windows 95, enjoy...unlimited machines. Well that didn't last long, and as word made it to beyond the "nerd herd"...and up to the Mi&#162;ro$oft execs..."WHAT?!?!?!

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