Author: Moritz Berger
Date: 07:38:10 11/02/97
I would like to hear your opinion about the main argument to justify copy protection with a dongle (paraphrased in my own words): "I a niche market like chess software, it is absolutely necessary to have copy protection. There is enough past experience to conclude with absolute certainity that having no copy protection is detrimental to product sales and endangers the very existence of a company." Obviously, the majority of all chess software publishers seems to believe in this reasoning. I would like to know the experience of other companies who sell non protected chess software (Chess Mentor, Rebel 9, Bookup, who else???) - did you lose your business or do your customers buy your products exactly because you have no copy protection? My own impression is that e.g. ChessBase is losing tremendous sales for its flagship product ChessBase 6 because of the copy protection issue. Am I the only one who waited literally years before finally reluctantly buying it in spite of the dongle? Or are there others who would buy it at the regular price ($240) if only the dongle was missing? Please treat this as a quick opinion poll, I don't want to exchange arguments about the various issues with the dongle here but instead simply try to quantify * how many users find a dongle acceptable * how many find the dongle unacceptable * if there are more lost sales due to the dongle than it potentially saves by preventing piracy Moritz
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