Software piracy has been a constant problem since the beginning of the computer era. One might even say that it is because of piracy that certain operating systems manufacturers enjoy a lion's share of the OS market, but that still doesn't stop these companies from putting the screws to the public. With the prolific growth of the World Wide Web, piracy has seen exponential growth as an industry.
More and more corporations are finding it difficult to protect their intellectual property rights which requires large amounts of funding. These expenses are passed on to the end consumer in the form of higher retail costs. For many, this propagates "borrowing" and duplicating through the use of CD and DVD burners in order to get around the higher costs.
Despite newer copy protections being utilized by the software manufacturers, hackers bypass and crack these copy protection schemes just as fast as they are created. In some cases in recent past, some copy protections used have backfired by preventing the very software it is supposed to protect from being read on certain brands of CD and DVD drives.
A newer concept to fight software piracy is based upon the subscription model service. This coupled with cloud computing, which is in its infancy, has a very real opportunity to curtail software piracy, however, for the time being the immediate future software medium for the end consumer is starting to trend toward USB thumb drives. This is partly due to the smaller physical size of materials and the rapidly declining cost of flash memory. Manufactures can save on shipping and packaging and can sell a tangible reusable product for additional cost by issuing software titles on USB thumb drives.
Eventually, but not for many years to come, there won't be a need to have any physical manifestations of software titles. We have started to see this in recent years with some tax filing software titles being hosted online. This is the effect and the best example of the World Wide Web. The limiting factor at this point is the lack of sufficient bandwidth for large software usage.
Small businesses and large corporations alike that have a need for training videos or surveillance videos will still have a use for issuing information on CD or DVD discs for archival purposes. The average family will also want to use DVD discs for their home videos and special events.
Eventually, with the convergence of multi-media computers and flat panel televisions, the need for DVD discs and players will become obsolete. This won't happen until the large majority of mainstream end consumers have at least one computer with the processing power capable of running multiple graphically intensive programs and other software simultaneously.
For more information and guidance about digital media, USB thumbdrive technology, and DVD authoring, visit http://www.benchmarkmultimedia.com Benchmark Multimedia specializes in digital media replication, production, and authoring for DVD, CD-ROM, and Flash Drive technology. Their site offers many insightful pointers on important digital media considerations.
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Daniel Elliott is an independent contractor who authors articles and media on a variety of topics for diverse audiences. WebDrafter.com, Inc. (http://www.webdrafter.com) produces Website design, hosting, and search engine marketing services for many of the clients, industries and markets related to the articles and media authored by Dan Elliott. If you would like Dan Elliott to ghost write or pen an article for you or your company, please contact him with your specifications.
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