Ubisoft's copy protection cop-out causes anger

This 'heroin dealer' sales model is not exclusive to the gaming world. Even heavyweight productivity software uses the free-taste-then-you-pay model to great effect. Adobe will cheerfully allow you to use its wallet-worryingly expensive Creative Suite of design software for 60 days without charge, then send you into a spiral of Photoshop withdrawal when your two months is up. If you do decide that CS4 is worth the £2500 Adobe demands, you will be drawn into a world of pain with upgrade reminders, password nagging and reinstalls which would test the patience of a saint.

Apple seems to have developed another model, though not one the Cupertino company would be willing to publicly admit. Here's one intriguing example. Many years ago, there were two heavyweight contenders in the music-creation software ring. Steinberg's Cubase and E-magic's Logic. The latter had bomb-proof security because of its hardware dongle and is one of the few mainstream software packages never to have been fully cracked. There were occasional software workarounds, but these were so unreliable and unstable, and the updates were so frequent, that it hardly seemed worth the trouble.

Cubase, on the other hand, was easily cracked and dodgy copies regularly flooded the interweb meaning that just about every bedroom junglist, amateur breakbeat freak and wannabe composer out there used what was widely seen as the inferior product as their weapon of choice.

Now this might not seem ideal for the folks at Steinberg but those tens of thousands of illegitimate users eventually turned into a few thousand serious users who, once they started making commercial gains from using the software, would repay that loyalty by buying genuine copies. Cubase had stolen a march on Logic simply by being easier to bootleg. Oh the irony.

Then along came Apple and, seeing the comparative sales figures, decided to shock the music industry with a move that very few saw coming. The company bought Logic lock stock and barrel from E-magic, seriously updated and improved the software, slashed the price in half, and completely removed all copy protection from the package. A bold move, indeed.

We suspect (though it is, of course, impossible to prove) that the clever folks at Apple saw the loyalty created by easy access to expensive software translated to increased sales when musos moved out of the bedroom and into the studio. Logic is rapidly becoming the industry standard for music production, which of course leads to increased sales of Apple hardware. Nice.

So what's the lesson for the software industry in all of this? It can be summed up by using another commercial allegory... 'razors and blades'. When you buy a fancy new razor, you generally get a handle and a couple of blades in a whizzy package at what seems like an incredibly good price. You happily shave for a week or two, wondering at the smoothness of your chin (or whatever you happen to be shaving) once those five titanium-tipped blades have been swept across its rugged contours.

Then you realise you have to go out and stump up a small fortune for new blades on a regular basis.