Jean-Claude Elias
If it is wrong for consumers to use pirated software, then it should be equally wrong for software companies to milk consumers.
It is difficult to decide on which side the abuse is greater and a globally balanced approach to the issue is something still unseen.
In many countries, including Jordan of course, authorities are tightening the grip on software piracy. A good thing by all means, knowing that Jordan does have a software industry, albeit not the size of the giant ones in the US, and that illegal software usage directly harms this industry and hampers its development.
Even users abiding by the law and paying for the programmes installed on their computers have hard time keeping up with the various versions and releases. The truth is you don’t buy software the way you’d buy the physical machine. These are products that are essentially different in nature.
As long as it does not break down or fail, a machine will serve for several years. Software, on the other hand, requires frequent updates or upgrades. Chances are each piece of software on your machine will be updated or upgraded several times during the useful lifetime of your computer.
Whether they do it to follow a carefully planned, smart marketing strategy or because they genuinely want to improve their products and make us benefit from such improvement, developers want us to constantly get new versions of their products - and pay for this naturally.
The schemes for buying, updating and upgrading software are many and vary significantly from one vendor to the other. Some will allow free upgrades within certain limits, or will ask for a fraction of the initial product price at each upgrade. Others are tougher and will demand money for each step they take in the course of enhancing their product. Not to mention the obvious cases when the software licence becomes invalid because you bought another computer or changed from Windows XP to Vista, for instance.
The common strategy, however, is to make the consumer pay for software the same way he would be paying a rent in a certain manner, and not like truly buying something tangible once and for all. Plus the sad fact that the software industry maintains a tight control on the lease duration the way it sees it fit.
There are few cases where governments have taken legal action against software giants, and in most of these rare instances, it was not directly to protect the end-user’s interest.
Microsoft, certainly not the worst company when it comes to abusing the consumer but perhaps the most exposed, has been fined a record of 1.7 billion euros last February by the European Union Commission. But it was about unfair competitive practice and not to protect the “poor” user.
This year, a considerable number of Windows users the world over are shifting from Microsoft’s XP version of the operating system (OS) to Vista. Alas, as if paying for Vista were not enough, they also have to update or upgrade most of the other applications that run on the OS and that are not compatible with the newer version.
I went through this experience myself and had to pay various amounts to keep all my software applications up and running under Vista. For some minor utilities like Better File Rename I was charged a reasonable $15, whereas Sony asked for $140 just to upgrade to the newer version of their Sound Forge audio recording programme.
With software, rent is always due.
