David Fine



David Fine

3/14/13

ENC 1102

Leslie Wolcott

Mobile App Piracy, Spreading Like Wildfire

Introduction

Many innocent people out there commit the evil of piracy without thinking twice of it. ”What's the harm in it if I'm only one person?" That's what many people think until it turns out to be a few million people illegally downloading a one dollar application for the Android operation system. Piracy is the illegally downloading of paid software which varies in shape and form. People who download software illegally are known as pirates. This can range from a full-fledged $600 special effects program that movie producers use to a small two-dollar app for your iPhone. In this Annotated Bibliography I will be focusing on the smaller of the two which doesn't get as much attention as the former. This is because of the small cost on these apps that people don't really see it as a big deal. However, this really is a big deal as the developers of these apps put thousands of hours into them just for people to get it for free leaving the developer with nothing. These small apps for smart phones are usually just games, add-ons, or pure convenience tools at the users disposal that they can choose to buy on their smart phone. However, people can't be attended to spend a dollar, two dollars, etc. on these apps so they instead download it illegally hurting the developers and even the economy. More so recently this has greatly increased due to the facilitation of these apps all over the internet as well as the lack of security, in particular on Android. Hackers can easily reverse-engineer an app to nab the code and then re-release it except for free or even for sale as a knockoff in China. Aspiring developers who wish to do this for a living may be greatly discouraged after reading this mainly due to the fact that all of your hard work can go to nothing as pirates download your app and don't give you a dime. The worst part is not much is being done except new security on these apps that gets breached within a few days by the hackers. This is a major problem in the application developing industry that will only get worse if there is no retribution for the offenders/a method to stop them from downloading the apps illegally.

Most of these articles are from magazine articles mainly just to notify the public of this major problem as magazines are read much more frequently than other news sources. Since the public is also home of the pirates this may just turn a few of their heads to realize the error in their ways and to stop pirating for good. I included a general article on piracy(SOFTWARE PIRACY DOES NOT HURT ANYONE?) and SOPA(Can online piracy be stopped by laws?) in an attempt to give a basis for the topic of piracy while the others focus on the main topic of app piracy. People need to understand that these app-sales are what developers feed their families with, pay their bills with, etc. and that by pirating these apps you are greatly hurting their sales and ability to pump out more apps. This also applies to the larger businesses that too are creating apps, they are losing sales causing them to not effectively create more apps, hire more staff, etc. Why is so little being done about this then when the effects are so major and when it is becoming a bigger and bigger problem? I understand it is difficult to create laws for millions of people doing something illegal, but if nobody does anything than it will only get worse. App piracy is beyond the point of waiting, it needs to be taken care of as soon as possible and within these articles you will find that while some bits of piracy are being taken care of, others simply are not or to a very minimal degree.

Annotations

Bradley, Tony. "This Trojan Horse Fights Piracy." PC World Jun 2011, Vol. 29 Issue 6,

p36 Web.

Trojan horses are deadly viruses that are hidden within code that are executed

upon that program being run, or in this case it is the pirated app that the user ran.

Tony Bradley is a very respected authority on technology with almost two decades experience in the field. In this article he reports of the "batman" of app. piracy in which somebody placed a trojan virus in the cracked version of the app. online. This virus sent a message out to all of the persons contacts and let them know that he illegally downloaded an app and called him "stupid and cheap." Once again this goes to show how cheap people are by not even paying for a $1 application. They are also willing to risk downloading a virus instead of just paying one dollar. Not only does this discourage app piracy, but it definitely gives some hope for the developers out there that there are individual people on their side out there trying to help. This trojan actually was effective to an extent and could be a possible method to slowing piracy down on a larger scale.

Bruno, Antony "Halting the Plunder." Billboard. 6 February 2010: Vol. 122 Issue 5, p13

Web.

Even over on the iPhone there are major piracy problems, not quite as bad as the Android OS, but still bad nonetheless. The author of this article, Antony Bruno, has spent 20 years as a journalist and is also very knowledgeable about technology. On the iPhone hackers have been continuously finding ways to 'jailbreak' the phones in order for people to download more things then they should be able to, such as new backgrounds for their phone, tethering apps, or even pirated apps that normally cost money. The main problem with this is the pirating of apps as it is causing a loss of money to the developers and Apple themselves. An app by the name of "I Am T-Pain" had a recorded download count of almost a million, however 250,000 of these downloads were pirated. Since the app costed $3 that is a $750,000 loss in total from people illegally downloading it. There's little that Apple can do to stop people from downloading these app's except by making the phone harder to 'jailbreak.' However, Apple also started allowing in-app purchases(in the application itself you buy things for real money) on free apps which counteracts piracy to an extent. This hopefully will protect their apps from any sort of piracy until they find a way to crack the in-app purchases to get those for free too.

Apple's suffering from piracy in this article fits into my conversation on piracy as it is right on topic.

Charlton, Alistair "FBI Siezes Three Android App Sites for Alleged Piracy." International Business Times 22 Aug 2011. Web.

There are many very strict laws focused around piracy that the government has put in place to attempt to persuade people from doing so. These have been around since the years of music piracy and are now being used for people pirating Android Applications. There are many articles on piracy but this one is quite more relevant to our current era in technology. Alistair Charlton is a very tech savvy journalist with many years in the field of writing about technology. On this website they had an article that talked about the FBI seizing three very large Android Application piracy websites and shutting them down for good. This was done because they were easily allowing tens of thousands of people to illegally download applications for free that originally cost money. This is a huge problem for the developers of these applications as it takes away a lot of the revenue that they gain from the application sales making it not worth it to develop quality applications for Androids. According to this article these applications have a pretty substantial impact to our nation's economy so by taking away these sales you are hurting our economy little by little.

The government attempted to take down these websites in an attempt to lower piracy rates of mobile phones which fits directly into what I'm discussing(mobile piracy).

Guseff, Dimitry."The Pirates of Android Ocean" Database & Network Journal Oct 2012: Vol. 42 Issue 5, p13. Web.

In our current realm of technology people will take anything they can get for free, and I mean anything. This article talks about the growing piracy issue for Android devices from the perspective of a few major Android Application companies. Madfinger Games(company) released a game last year known as Dead Trigger for the Android OS. The piracy rate on that game was so large, 90%, they decided to just make the game free since so many already had it for free. Rovio, Angry Bird's developer, believes that this piracy isn't purely a negative thing as the more people pirating the game, the more popular it is becoming. However, they are losing many sales because of piracy which is a problem. These companies can't purely rely on advertisements in their games for revenue and need some sales otherwise they will "flop." Android essentially was made for piracy with all of the freedom given to the user of installing anything they want from multiple sources. By doing that people can easily download the applications for free off of the internet without having to even look twice at the Market Application. This creates a negative feedback loop as the more piracy occurs, the quality of the applications will fall to the point where nobody will even bother pirating them. Once more protection comes out against piracy than the developers will begin to receive some revenue for their product and "actually may receive income."

This article discusses piracy of Android devices fitting into what I'm attempting to discuss in this annotated bibliography which is mobile piracy.

Jamil, Danish, and Zaki Hassan. "Software Piracy Does Not Hurt

Anyone?." International Journal of Engineering Science 3 2011.

Many people believe that by downloading software illegally they aren't hurting anybody nor breaking any laws. This is causing piracy rates to increase. The authors Jamil and Hassan both have many years in the software engineering field and still currently work as software engineers in Pakistan. This article starts off defining software piracy and the different examples of it for use throughout the article. It moves right along into the people that do commit software piracy and why they do it regardless of the hefty fines or possible viruses they could receive. These people just need to download the reverse engineered programs that hackers create from legitimate programs. Even if these programs have some form of security to stop piracy, the hackers still manage to get around it and reproduce the program for free or for a much lesser price. This occurs the most frequently in America with an astonishing 93% piracy rate while countries like Japan only have 23%. It may sound simple just to punish the wrong-doers, but it's very difficult to do so when millions have illegally downloaded software and charging copyright infringement against all of them would be very difficult. Instead many companies are attempting to make the 'deal' much more sweet when purchasing the legal copy by throwing in updates with it, back-up disks, discounts, etc. They are desperate to try and lower the piracy rates as a few companies would see 30-50% profit increases if every copy downloaded was legitimate. In total if all pirated copies were purchased it would give the government 135 billion in tax dollars. This is becoming a major issue as it is becoming increasingly easier to distribute illegal copies of software and then for 'commonminded' people to pirate that software.

Although this looks at the broad spectrum of software, this still applies to apps for mobile phones as those too are greatly pirated which fits into my conversation.

Kharif, Olga. "The Pirate-Infested Waters of App-Retailing" Bloomberg Businessweek, 5 Nov 2011: Issue 4303, p44. Web.

In the world of Piracy for phone applications there is a constant combatant between the pirates and the developers. The developers want to stop the "bad guys" from downloading their hard work for free especially when more than 50% of the total downloads from a game are from people illegally downloading it for free. Olga Kharif has been a technology writer for them since 2000 and is quite experienced in the field of technology. The App-Business is currently worth $10 billion which is quite a lot considering they've only been around for a few years. Pirating one small $1 download may not seem like much, but when 50,000 people are doing this it creates a problem. It may not seem as obvious as it seems that you are truly hurting a company/person, people love free things without realizing the actual consequences of it. Currently developers are putting anti-tampering technology from Arxan Technologies to stop hackers from getting into the code and modifying the app essentially. Also Google is finally beefing up their security of pirated applications by creating a verification process that verifies that the application was bought on that phone otherwise it won't let you run it.

This article discusses anti-piracy technology which fits into my discussion except on the opposite side of the spectrum.

star- "Android Developers Fears on Piracy Risks." Software World Nov

2012: Vol. 43 Issue 6, p14. Web.

This pretty recent article discusses the major pain of piracy when creating Android applications. The author of this article, star- is a website dedicated to selling software protection mechanisms for over a decade now giving them some definite authority on the conversation of piracy. Android is currently the world's most popular mobile platform with over 400 million activated devices worldwide. With this many devices there are many users downloading apps, some doing it legal others downloading them illegally. According to a survey put out by Protection Technology Research more than half of Android app developers see this illegal downloading of apps as a major problem that needs to be addressed. Piracy is threatening these businesses all by its lonesome by simply taking away profits from the developers. Some of the developers still make some revenue from advertisements within the apps, but not nearly as much as they would have made if there was less people pirating their games/software. This is all stemming from the issue that Android users can install applications from different sources other than the main Google Marketplace where all app developers upload their hard work as well as the fact that there is currently "no reliable Android digital rights management."

The fear on piracy risks fits into my conversation of piracy very well as this is exactly what my conversation entails.

Samuelson, Pamela. "Can online piracy be stopped by laws?." Communications of the

ACM 55.7 2012: 25-27.

Last year SOPA was on its way through the two houses, Senate and House of Representatives, before it wasn't approved due to the overwhelming amount of disapproval it was receiving from people in the United States. SOPA is the Stop

Online Piracy Act in which all online piracy would come to a halt in the U.S. However, SOPA was only attempting to end online piracy, but so much more was added onto there that caused it to become a flawed bill. Pamela Samuelson is recognized as a pioneer in digital copyright law, cyberlaw, etc. making her the perfect candidate to discuss SOPA and contribute to the conversation on piracy. It is difficult to make a law to stop online piracy with so many conflicting views and laws. This law would have to be much more narrow than SOPA was in order to only affect the targeted audience rather than a general group. SOPA will be revived into another bill eventually, but one written much better.

The mentioning of SOPA is crucial for the topic on app piracy because it would've have affected piracy rates overall which would in term effect my entire conversation.

Segan, Sascha. "Why You Should Pay For Your Apps." PC Magazine Mar 2013 p24-27 Web.

Currently applications for smartphones are on a huge rise as more and more people purchase smart phones. Sascha Segan has reviewed hundreds of cell- phones, and other technology in his five years with PC Magazine meaning he is very up to date with cell-phones as well as their apps and app piracy.With more smart phones comes more app purchases and with more users comes more piracy. People enjoy "free" things even if its illegal even if they are hurting the developers who created the app. These people pirating these apps think they may only be hurting a company, but for many of these apps are made by either one person or a really small group. This is the last chance for one person to "make it big" in this world where big businesses dominate the economy. The author of this article argues that the only reason to pirate an app that costs $2 or $1 is if you are below the poverty line as we spend that same amount of money on something stupid such as a bag of chips. This entire article is about why you should download mobile apps which essentially is the heart of my conversation.

Stone, Jeff "uTorrent Launches Android App, Ushering In Torrent Downloads Directly

To Phones, Tablets." International Business Times. 6 September 2012 Web.

uTorrent is an incredibly popular program on the computer that has been around for a few years and has over 150 million users worldwide and the company that creates it(BitTorrent Inc.) is now bringing it to Android devices. Jeff Stone the author isn't adding to the conversation on piracy, but is rather only reporting it. This app gained massive popularity due to the millions of people who used it for their computers. BitTorrent doesn't plan on releasing it for Apple products it anytime soon leaving it to Android devices only. However considering the mass piracy already occurring within the Android spectrum this would only add to it as seen by other services of similar uses. One of the Pirate Bay founders(large torrent website) was recently arrested so for BitTorrent Inc. to expand their business is very risky of people abusing their software to pirate free apps for Android.

uTorrent is already greatly used for piracy on Computer Software so there is nothing stopping users from pirating apps on Androids instead causing further piracy rates on mobile devices which is what I'm discussing in this paper.

Hayley Tsukayama. "'Dead Trigger' Now Free in Google Play Thanks to Piracy."

Washington Post, The. 7 Jan 2011. Web.

On Android Devices Madfinger Games essentially was forced to reduce the price of 'Dead Trigger' one of their apps to nothing because of the unusually high piracy on it. Hayley Tsukayama has a master's degree in journalism and is very up to date with technology making her a good contributor for current piracy issues. Android Devices boast incredibly high piracy rates, but nothing on this scale. Madfinger games essentially realized that since most of the users were from pirated downloads they decided to just release it as a free app. On the flip side many of the customers who actually paid for the app were upset because Madfinger gave into the pirates' demands. In the last sentence of this article it discusses how game developer Mika Mobile no longer is developing apps for Android basically due to the piracy and lack of security costing them profits. However, Android recently released their newest OS which is the "most secure yet" which should "hopefully" help with piracy issues.

This is a two-sided article with Android actually attempting to deal with these piracy issues, yet Madfinger games succumbed to piracy and made their app free because of it both of which apply to my conversation.

Roger Yu. "App piracy in China hurts developers' bottom lines." USA TODAY 15 Aug

2012 Web

Roger Yu is a technology reporter for USA Today who prior to writing for them covered travel beat for 5 years giving him much needed experience. Piracy isn't only an issue in the United States, over in China there are less copyright laws making it even easier to get away with piracy there. Worse yet, they don't just illegally download the app, they download the code, alter it then resell it as a knockoff taking away profits from the original developer. China doesn't have an official Google Android app. store meaning they have multiple smaller app. stores of which sell many pirated games from other parts of the world or even repackaged games from within China. This hurts the developers greatly as they are losing precious resources to knockoffs/pirated versions of their application. Unless some new form of copyright infringement laws become established in China this will be a growing problem.

.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download