Software Piracy Quotes

In the early days of the software industry, people cared about copyright and didn't give a damn about patents - they copied each other willy-nilly.

Stealing things is everybody's problem. We [Apple Inc.] own a lot of intellectual property, and we don't like when people steal it. So people are stealing stuff and we're optimists. We believe that 80 percent of the people stealing stuff don't want to be; there's just no legal alternative.

I liked hacking into and pirating computer games while in college. One of my favorites was Bethesda's 'Terminator 2029.' So I drove to their offices and asked for a job.

Imagine the disincentive to software development if after months of work another company could come along and copy your work and market it under its own name...without legal restraints to such copying, companies like Apple could not afford to advance the state of the art.

The intellectual property situation is bad and getting worse. To be a programmer, it requires that you understand as much law as you do technology.

In the epic war over Silicon Valley's intellectual property, Bill Gates was on the side of licensing copyright and robust protections for intellectual property. He wasn't on the side of the hackers, and he didn't want information to be free.

Proprietary software tends to have malicious features. The point is with a proprietary program, when the users don't have the source code, we can never tell. So you must consider every proprietary program as potential malware.

About three million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.

I'm an expert witness in a case that's in appeal about a guy who allegedly misappropriated source code from a major, major company - he actually worked there and then apparently they found it on his laptop later.

I think piracy itself is going to end up going away.

I still haven't heard anything from Apple about my hacks. There is a tool based on my work reverse-engineering Apple's FairPlay called jhymn that's been hosted on a U.S. server for over a year and nothing has happened.

Proprietary software grew up, starting really in the 1980s, as an alternative and that became the dominant model with the rise of companies like Microsoft and Oracle and the like.

If you, or any public-spirited programmer, wanted to figure out what the software on your machine is really doing, tough luck. It's illegal to reverse engineer the source code of commercial software to find out how it works.

Piracy doesn't bother me that much, to be quite honest.

I can write a program that lets you break the copy protection on a music file. But I can't write a program that solders new connections onto a chip for you.

I do read licenses, and they aggravate me, but a computer isn't much good without software. When I need a product, I hold my nose and click 'agree.'

If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs.

Limit use of shareware and public domain software to systems without fixed disks. If you do use them on fixed disks, allocate separate subdirectories... Public domain or shareware software should never be placed in the root directory.

It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not.

So what I was essentially doing was, I compromised the confidentiality of their proprietary software to advance my agenda of becoming the best at breaking through the lock.

The use of pirated software in China is really quite a sizeable loss to our software producers.