Bit Shift

Read/Write Web manages to stay off my “To Unsubscribe” list once more with a gem titled “The Flipside of BitTorrent - Why Some Musicians Still Hate It.” In it, David Lowery pops up again (you may remember him from such rants as the Emily White Thing) to debunk the supposed rosiness of not-paying-for creative works. Just a few thoughts about his response and a link to some more debunked myths follow:

“You really think there are no lost sales in BitTorrent activity? Can I have some of what you are smoking? Why would you search for a song called ‘Take the Skinheads Bowling’ unless you heard the song?”

A common misconception of old-time publishers is that every download represents a lost sale, and to contest that premise is akin to denying the holocaust. But, just as radio plays did more for selling songs than not-radio ever did, piracy doesn’t always mean someone had $1.29 in hand for a single, then pirated it and bought an ice cream cone instead.

While songs cost less now than ever before, the audience for a given format is spread exponentially thinner than it was 10 years ago. That is, it seems the cultural zeitgeist is much less specific. This is a good thing, because it means that the artists that could rise to the top today tend to be more niche-y than 20 years ago. And if there is too much sameness, discovery becomes a far larger problem for you because your audience is not telling your story.

Lowery had previously praised the RIAA’s corporate members as a valuable selection process that elevates the best music above the rest. That’s probably somewhat true, but the overhead they introduce into the process now looks really wasteful as the margins tighten. The artists still have to spend quite a bit of time building their brand and differentiating themselves. After all those publisher loans are paid off and management/production costs are accounted for, it’s really the rare artist that comes out ahead.

“I’ve not met one [middle class artist] that is honestly cool with people sharing files instead of buying them.”

This is a hard one to tackle. Collectively, we have put ourselves in this position where we have permitted limited monopolies based upon intellectual property to grow and grow. Along with that, we’ve developed ways of easily circumventing those monopolies. And we’ve made it nigh unto impossible to detect and enforce the breaches of those monopolies. It’s not entirely the fault of the Constitution’s copyright clause, as I mostly disagree with much of the interpretation of “limited times.”

The reason why it’s hard to grasp this is that, we have come to accept that the US Constitution represents what are really just natural rights to personal liberty that everyone in any country should have. I tend to look at intellectual property laws as unnatural laws, which is why I favor more limitation than most probably do.

But does it matter what I or the middle class artists think? Imagine you are setting out to make great music today and you have no legal pretense, but you’re savvy enough to know about the internet’s realities. Would you price your music album at $18 right away? $15? $12? Remember that at the beginning of this millenium, $18 albums were the norm. This was uncoincidentally when Napster was invented.

I firmly believe that any artist can ask for whatever amount they want for their work. But my prerogative as a customer must be that I can choose to not buy it for that amount. I can buy nothing at all or I can buy something else. Without piracy even entering into the picture, you lost a sale of your $18 album.

Now, returning to the internet realities argument for a moment: if YouTube exists in this reality, how much value relative to the upper quadrant of YouTube music do you need to add in order to have me give you attention (not even money, yet) for your work? I’d say that it’s very high (even subtracting VEVO videos).

So those YouTube folks are getting attention that you don’t get because you’re obscuring your product behind a pay wall. Probably a pretty reasonable pay wall, but it’s still one that keeps that 14 year old with $5 from hearing your stuff. Did YouTube just lose you a sale? Yes, just as much as piracy does (and we’re still not talking about piracy yet).

OK, fast forward a year and you’ve managed to convince some teenagers to purchase your album. And one of them liked it so much that they bought a physical disc of it (hypothetically… just go with it). This customer of yours has played the CD every day for two months straight, and this week he’s finally lent the disc out to his friend who he thinks would like it. His friend listens to the album on repeat over and over and over again. He really likes it! Great! Another sale, right? Nope. Not as we measure lost sales in RIAA world, it’s not.

That was just shy of piracy, actually. Were it not for the fact that the physical piece of plastic exchanged hands, this would have been an illegal transaction (what with all those 1s and 0s flying around inside of both’s music players). In fact, who knows how long that music player caches the data… might be illegal anyway.

As ridiculous as this sounds, it’s this type of specious argument that prevents the artists of the world from moving past the roller coaster of what is a lost sale and into the real business of building a tribe.

As I was writing this post, the always excellent TorrentFreak blog posted a fantastic article titled “It’s Time To Debunk The Myth That Copyright Is Needed To Make Money – Or That It Even Makes Money.” It’s a great companion to this post, so go read it!

This is part 2 of Big Fat Thieves, discussing copyright violations on the internet. You can read part 1 here.

Despite the law being on the side of copyright protection, I think the best argument to the law’s existing stance on copyright is that making a copy of something has always been about the importance of the inevitable ubiquity of works. But creating and distributing content to a massive audience has gone from an investment to something that can now be done nearly accidentally. Don’t conflate this with me saying that all content was trivial to make or that copying material is akin to competing with material, because I’ve never thought that. More importantly, much content can and is being created ever nearer to real-time. 

In “If you want to get paid for your freelance work,” Seth Godin put it this way:

… access to tools is no longer sufficient. Everyone you compete with has access to a camera, a keyboard, a guitar. Just because you know how to use a piece of software or a device doesn’t mean that there isn’t an amateur who’s willing to do it for free, or an up and comer who’s willing to do it for less.

What I’m getting at with this quote is that information and content is getting easier and cheaper to make. Often, in the most recent few years, this information has not been created whole cloth, but cut together from existing works. The defense for this is traditionally that it’s shielded by fair use. And the concept of fair use has been broadening socially, while not judicially. In a couple of years, it is possible that social moires no longer present a stigma onto using someone else’s story to tell a slightly different story or a tweaked version of the same story. In short, it’s getting cloudy what is purely helpful and what is abominably thieving.

So, what can a content creator do about the enhanced “sharing” nature of the internet? More from Seth Godin:

…then you ought to find and lead a tribe, build a base of people who want you, and only you, and are willing to pay for it.

…then you need to develop both skills and a reputation for those skills that make it clear to (enough) people that an amateur solution isn’t nearly good enough, because you’re that much better and worth that much more.

…then you should pick yourself and book yourself and publish yourself and stand up and do your work, and do it in a way for which there are no substitutes.

Tom Naughton has been doing this very well, perhaps without even realizing fully what he’s done. I can tell by following his blog that he’s operating very cautiously, perhaps because he’s been burned so badly by his physical distributors (who are the only true thieves by the traditional definition). But he has built a tribe and those people are increasingly more passionate about what he’s been making. 

At some point, I imagine he’ll quit programming once he has seen a couple of years of steady income from his documentary work. Jonathan Coulton followed a similar path, albeit with the accelerated help of several self-building geek tribes. Coulton has been quoted as saying this:

Now I sort of think of the whole engine as a special genetically engineered cow who eats music and poops money – I have no idea what’s going on in its gut, and I have the luxury of not really caring that much about the particulars.

If Naughton were fortunate enough to be discovered by the right few groups, I’m sure he’d be able to ride that momentum into the next stratosphere. 

While it would be great in some ways if money always changed hands in these sorts of things, the silver lining is that the tools used for illegal copying is also used to spread meaning to others. The trick for those being ripped off is to use the promotion to boost the tribe’s aura and let the poop flow in.

This is part 1 of Big Fat Thieves, discussing copyright violations on the internet. You can read part 2 here.

 Tom Naughton made a popular documentary, and that’s where his problems started.

Fat Head is a pseudo-rebuttal to the nutrition-based/fear-mongering Morgan Spurlock film Supersize Me. The last half of the film goes on to discuss what the data from multiple clinical studies actually show us (and it contradicts almost all of Supersize Me’s implications). Tom also spends a good deal of time being transparent about his own successful personal dietary journey. The film has been eye-opening for a large number of people who discovered it freely on Hulu or Netflix and has garnered its own loyal community over at the Fat Head blog. This has become a pretty standard internet niche success story, now and it is where the power of social media really helps bring good content to the forefront. You should go watch it.

Where the story derails is when Tom wrote a clearly frustrated post about having to play YouTube whack-a-mole with people who are posting unauthorized copies of Fat Head onto the site. He lamented the incredulousness of those who were stealing from him and gave them a blog lashing along with some questionable metaphors.

Turns out that, unbeknownst to Tom, the official Fat Head distributor actually had also legally uploaded the video to YouTube, so all of the unauthorized copies should have been actually generating revenue for Naughton anyway. All of those unauthorized nuggets should actually have been generating revenue for him. 

Yeah, but ad revenue is a pittance compared to retail, right? Naughton says he made $0 from film’s physical media distributors, which of course are the linchpins of commerce. What’s that? They never paid? They mysteriously went out of business? That can’t be common, though (it is).

Some of the commenters on Naughton’s blog were right, though. As bad as it is, this still isn’t thievery. And the amount of work and money you put into making a movie should be tempered with the fact that many people are looking at movie making as trivial now, because the tools are within their grasp.  That has to be a part of your equation, and either make it very convenient to give you money for your work, or make your work completely scarce.

Amnesia developer on piracy: “screw it”

Isn’t this really the only practical stance to take towards piracy?

We sold some games to customers, we built a tribe, and the pirates don’t get counted as something that deserves our attention.

Since the reports a few weeks ago about Ubisoft’s 93-95% claimed piracy numbers, Ubi has continued sending ambassadors out discussing how they are reducing their DRM away from the always-on requirements type to the just-activate-it-on-your-machine type. Tying a game to a machine (or even 5 machines) is still dumb, but not nearly as reviled as requiring one to always be online when server downtime or sunsetting is always a possibility. I guess that if we go from the fire back to the frying pan, we are supposed to be grateful.

It saddens me when I see video game publishers still wrestling over simple customer-satisfaction items like this that are pretty-well solved in the minds of average customers. I look at the video game world as a precursor to the inevitable digital mainlining of most media (mainly the PC gaming world, because the consoles are still acting anti-competitively).

Downloadable music still has a ways to go there, but it’s farther along than TV shows and somewhat movies. But most MP3 customers don’t understand DRM and really shouldn’t have to. Because of the early rifts in digital music rights, there remains a lot of misinformation about where you can play a song you buy on iTunes (the answer is anywhere, now, but at first it was not so) or what to do with music bought from Amazon (drop it into your music device, or import it into iTunes if you roll that way).

It’s odd to me, looking back, that Apple was content to throw away the Fairplay DRM that it developed and move into DRM-free music as soon as it could get the labels to agree to it. Contrast that behavior to Ubisoft’s cattiness when asked by RPS if their DRM had been a mistake. RPS thinks they’re protecting their shareholder’s perspective, but Apple saw a resurgence in its stock following the removal of DRM from iTunes songs.

In fairness, Apple wasn’t producing the music they sold, but their profits were still tied to sales. And, surprise, the world didn’t come down. And people still buy music on iTunes even at their relatively high prices. I suspect that Ubisoft still kind of believes that DRM works, despite all of the evidence to the contrary. And, even if it doesn’t work, as least they’re doing something. If that something alienates the people waving money at you instead of serving them, that something you did was wrong.

Some gaming commenters are up in arms over the nature of Ubisoft’s CEO’s pretty bold claim of 93-95% for his company’s games. Indeed, on its face that number sounds more than just a little on the high side.

Recurring BitShift readers remember the MadFinger Games 80% piracy rate claim for Dead Trigger (and maybe you heard their 90% piracy rate for Shadowgun). As I had explained during that fiasco, the piracy we might typically envision is an American college student downloading cracked versions of the $60 game on a whim and playing it for weeks on end. But that is flawed, because the bulk of PC software piracy is actually happening in countries that are less developed and more corrupt. I pointed to Armenia in this chart, because it has the highest rate and is known for a very corrupt government and banking system. 

So, intrepid link-clickers, what precisely is the PC software piracy rate of the country with the highest rate of piracy? Why, it’s 93%. If those numbers are to be believed, then it would seem that Ubisoft’s CEO, Yves Guillemot (am I the only one who knows how to spell Guillemot because of the old graphics card brand?), is actually only referring to those types of countries when he mentions this high of a piracy rate. Because if he included the other countries, all things being equal, the number would be much, much lower than 90%. In fact, the weighted average on that chart of international software piracy puts it at 59.9%. That’s because countries such as the United States, which has the lowest piracy rate at 20%, bring the average down quite a bit (33 percentage points).

So, is Guillemot including all countries in this statement? Well, it would seem not, since in the same interview, just before the most famous sound bite, he singles out only certain countries:

“We want to develop the PC market quite a lot and F2P is really the way to do it. The advantage of F2P is that we can get revenue from countries where we couldn’t previously - places where our products were played but not bought. Now with F2P we gain revenue, which helps brands last longer.

“It’s a way to get closer to your customers, to make sure you have a revenue. On PC it’s only around five to seven per cent of the players who pay for F2P, but normally on PC it’s only about five to seven per cent who pay anyway, the rest is pirated. It’s around a 93-95 per cent piracy rate, so it ends up at about the same percentage. The revenue we get from the people who play is more long term, so we can continue to bring content.” 

93% Software Piracy is a Real Thing… in Armenia

So, Guillemot’s statement about 93% actually matches quite a bit with the piracy rate in Armenia. Whether the number holds true for Ubisoft specifically is still not known. It may be based upon their company’s specific data or it could be off of these countries’ averages. But the intent here is that certain countries will pirate more, and that is almost certainly true. Therefore, Ubisoft wants to find ways to monetize the high-piracy countries. That is the context of his statements, and it’s getting buried in the furor over the 95% piracy rate allegations.

I don’t fully understand how his F2P model lets them charge people where the games were “played but not bought.” This may be a discrepancy from what I’ve read about the banking systems and what Ubisoft believes they can do. Somehow those 7% are paying for software, so it’s not impossible to do. I don’t mind F2P games in theory, if they are done right. Most of them are not. Time will tell if they are successful.

The real problem with Ubi’s response to piracy is that they are simultaneously doing nothing to bolster the community towards their side. My I-don’t-make-my-living-from-games stance has been that your support of the game for the sake of your actual customers (and pirates aren’t customers, remember?) builds the mutual trust bridge between you (the developer) and your audience.

Valve manages to build good will regardless of the pseudo-DRM that Steam carries (which isn’t impenetrable, either) because they have the world’s most incredible post-release game support. I think precisely zero people were mad when Team Fortress 2 went free-to-play after a couple of years of being a $20 retail product. Why? Because it surpassed its initial value many times over.  Contrast that to Dead Trigger, which was $0.99 but went free-to-play in less than a month.

So, instead of punishing the people who are willing to legally buy your games by adding in incredibly restrictive DRM that does nothing or by delaying the PC release for multiple months after consoles, how about finding new, exciting ways to serve your customers? How about being the company that finds innovative ways to make it actually pleasurable to be a customer?

What have you done for me lately, Ubisoft?

This is part 2 of a 2 part post. See part 1.

So, what is changing for the benefit of the customer? At the beginning of July, the European Court ruled that software licenses can be resold in certain cases. Valve (and Steam) said they they are aware of the ruling, but aren’t planning on changing anything just yet. That might seem odd, but remember the ruling wasn’t about games, so it may be a canary in the digital distribution coal mine, but that doesn’t mean anybody needs to change strategies just yet.

Current Impulse-owner Gamestop hints that they are considering pre-owned digital sales, which fits with their brand’s trade-in legacy perfectly. That could be a great way to distinguish themselves from the rest of the pack and link back to the core principles of Impulse founder Stardock’s and its Gamers Bill of Rights. I first thought that this might be a possibility after seeing the Steam Wallet/Gamestop tie in. It seems much more evolutionary in that context. 

But is transferring ownership always going to be a good thing for the customer? I tend to think that the current set up is more of a two-way street. While customers cannot transfer ownership, we also are enjoying a lower initial cost of ownership for many games. This is especially true as you contrast cost of development against retail pricing both today and 15 years ago. Right now, it doesn’t cost much at all to be able to get a game straight from Steam. If a used digital game market sprung up overnight, lots of things could happen as the market attempts to adjust for that. Those games can have second, third, or fourth lives as people trade them around. There’s less demand for the Steam’s copy, so the temptation might be strong to create some scarcity. 

I’m speculating, but I don’t believe it would happen for very long for most games. But a high-demand market might be able to support a $150 price for a few AAA games if they had resale. But other factors would influence that, too, such as multiplayer or co-op integration (it’s no fun to be the only one of your gaming circle with a copy of a heavy multiplayer game) and subscription services (who cares about initial cost, if sustained cost is so high?).

I’d suppose that one of the most appealing solutions for most parties that might come out is one where the resale is overseen and managed by the platform. If the split is 70/20/10 to the player/publisher/platform, then even the pre-owned sale nets the company unforeseen revenue and makes it worthwhile to encourage the act. I suspect gamers will want a little more than that cut, and some publishers will demand significantly more, which means I’m probably pretty close.

Soothsaying is exhausting. But, no matter how right or wrong I am, I do think this digital economic landscape is being completely redefined over the next 5 years. And I would be surprised if the complications surrounding intellectual property law don’t spur the international economies to collude towards a more consistent approach to how we do business.

For the prelude to this amazing post about digital ownership, see part 1. 

This is part 1 of a 2 part post. See part 2.

The holy grail of digital ownership is the first sale doctrine. Though it’s something very innocuous in analog life, consumers generally wish for a way to have a real flow-through for our digital goods. This week comes news that there is a good chance that we’ll soon see a more customer-advantaged digital world where we can take advantage of our licensed (read “owned”) items.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, when you pay for a digital thing, you are obtaining a copy of that thing along with a license that dictates under which terms you may use it. Well, many of the laws that we built our commerce upon were written with the assumption that any copy of an artistic or intellectual work would also be tied to a physical good. So, even though the act of copying works was cheap, it still was somewhat cost prohibitive and it required some amount of the copier’s time to do.

That’s why the Supreme Court ruled against the publisher who tried to enforce a notice in its books that any sale of the book under $1.00 constituted infringement of its copyright.

Of course, digital copying makes all of those assumptions about the physical nature of copies irrelevant. Since it’s so trivial to make a copy of a digital item and preserve its entire quality, the first sale doctrine has been consistently unapplied to digital works. Instead, software makers have taken to fastening end user license agreements (EULAs) to the front-end of the software and requiring your full agreement to the practically illegible document before you begin your use. It’s these EULAs that have replaced physical ownership for software like games. In the music, book, and video world, there really are no EULAs for the content, but you still do not own the work; you merely possess a copy of it.

And that copy is likely the most valuable copy of a work yet. Vinyl records, magnetic tapes, even optical discs have been wearing out, deteriorating, or cracking for decades. Any of those are legal to resell. Yet a flawless copy of a new song which was recorded digitally, edited digitally, and perhaps sold losslessly is legally confined to your own collection forever.

The reason is that when you resell your digital good, you retain the copy of it. So you would be violating both distribution and reproduction rights. This is the reason that my article “Hoarding’s Rightful Place is in the Cloud” falters in its argument, somewhat. One consistent trait of hoarders is that they maintain a significant belief that their hoarding is actually a series of small investments and they likely will have some significant value that is difficult to see amongst the glut of it. While that assertion of value is generally fallacious, there is at least a minimal amount of value for some of these items as at least scrap, if not real value to the right person at the right time.

Digital goods, generally, currently have none of these aspects. If resale is legally prohibited, your license generally stops with you and even a good faith effort to dispose of your extra copies does not make your act legal.

For the conclusion of this amazing post about digital ownership, see part 2. 

In one week, we can go from talking about mobile game Dead Trigger’s allegedly high piracy rate (and implying that MadFinger Games is not making much money on it, which I somehow doubt) straight over to the PC world: you know, that place where software piracy was born and continues to be nurtured.

PC piracy doesn’t seem to be declining at all (at least not in absolute terms), despite lots of new legislation across countries designed to discourage it. I don’t want to spend a lot of time on the piracy part again, but it’s worth noting that not everybody who uses software looks like you do (and I don’t even know what you look like). As I said in the Dead Trigger article, most of the pirating seems correlated to the east European, west Asian, or African  countries. And it shouldn’t come as any surprise; bootlegging is something of a national past time there. That might be terrible if this was 18 years ago and your game was only releasing in the retail shops of Armenia, where software piracy is 93%.

But in the actual world, a software developer has a far different reality. The same bridges that make piracy simpler, can also make it far less hassle to just legally acquire software for cheap… at least for countries who have non-corrupt banking systems (speaking of Armenia, it’s at least corrupt enough to have it’s own “Corruption in Armenia” Wikipedia article). My point, which I’ve made before, is that pirates will statistically be pirates, for all of the reasons that they are pirates already. It’s most likely tied to depravity of man combined with an immediate, connected global economy and nearly perfect anonymity. 

Because of that, I don’t know how useful it is for companies to track what percentage of their users are pirates (MadFinger decided to drop a number on us, too bad it was a percentage), because the pirate users aren’t customers. They’re effectively demo players until they enter into your court of legitimate users. The real hurt comes from deciding to tie in the networking components of an in-app purchasing system and possibly centralized servers for gameplay. Just like StarDock saw when Demigod was pirated upon release, that soaks up a lot of available resources and degrades the experience for paying customers. That game is made to be a multiplayer, connected game (and is a great game, by the way). Piracy swings the load around pretty heavily and can really hurt the profitability of the publisher if a circumvention isn’t applied.

So, with all of that said, it’s kind of thrilling to see Stardock enjoying a very profitable all-digital release of Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion. Wardell has always been very protective of shelf sales in the past, so his discussion of the digital sales response to the new Sins game is very encouraging.

Likewise, Minecraft got a little attention recently when PC Gamer inquired why Notch hasn’t moved it to Steam since a number of his concerns are no longer Minecraft easily doesn’t need Steam to be successful, since PC Gamer speculates it currently makes a million dollars every three days. I don’t really think that Minecraft is in a significantly different category of game than Dead Trigger, and it’s managing to be profitable without in-app purchasing and never had to worry much about its pirates.

Maybe, in a world where anyone can get any game, they only want to pay for the good ones.

It’s always interesting, to me, how differently developers can respond to piracy. MadFinger is choosing to make its Dead Trigger game free based upon allegedly “unbelievably high” and “giant” piracy. As Android Central points out, however, those aren’t quantifiable measures. Thus, some hyperbolic headline straight from the school of “things you don’t need to prove.”

I’m not questioning whether or not it’s happening, but I do believe it’s prudent to question the response of changing the price from $0.99 to free. Just some light research into this developer’s recent decisions regarding the app reveals that Dead Trigger wasn’t a thing that mattered statistically prior to Google I/O 2012. See this chart from Google Trends:

You may or may not recall that Dead Trigger was one of the demo apps showing off the hardware power of Google’s new tablet. At that point (June 27th, or the first red bump up in the chart), the game was not yet released. It wasn’t until July 2nd when it was released on the Play store (the day before the first orange bump in the chart, which correlated to interest in the APK). If you look at both the red and orange  lines, they are both trending downward following their release date spike. That seems to make sense to me. Especially if it’s as meh as Shadowgun was (I have yet to play Dead Trigger). Measuring piracy is tricky, so it’d be nice just to see which internal metrics MadFinger was using determine the “unbelievably high” rate. Even DRM companies get these measures wrong. And the target audience following the game’s release (the game was shown to millions of Android devs, a decent sized portion of which were physically in attendance at I/O and walked away with multiple devices) may cloud the issue significantly more than Shadowgun’s release.

The other thing that jumps out at me is the list of regions that popped up below the trend lines.

While this list is sorted by Shadowgun, it’s the long red Russian line that represents Dead Trigger search volume for the last 30 days. Here’s the same list but sorted by the Dead Trigger search:

It’s probably not a huge surprise that the most interest comes from MadFinger’s own Czech Republic and similar Eastern European countries. Many of these countries are statistically correlated to the highest rates of software piracy, in general. Whether or not we understand the reasons behind why someone is searching for a given Android app, we don’t have to blame Android if the country’s citizenry is hostile towards intellectual property anyway (Fun fact, the US is the last on that list at 20%, so consider that when writing your anti-piracy articles).

Because this is an easy press story, most of the stories I’m reading are just accepting the claims made by MadFinger. Phil at Android Central is the first I saw to question the claim, albeit indirectly. I was inspired to write this post after seeing this snippet from MadFinger:

Anyway - DEAD TRIGGER is not FREEMIUM, it always was and still remains FREE-TO-PLAY, that means, all players are able to play it without IAP!

I suspect there is probably some weak English at play that clouds this quite a bit. However, “it always was and still remains free-to-play” hints to me that there was at least some form of plan from the beginning to have this game be free. I speculate that it’s reasonable to see the game plan went like this:

1. Develop Dead Trigger app with F2P engine complete with requisite in-app purchasing
2. Show off at Google I/O
3. Set price of app low enough to be palatable for users who find in-app purchases tempting (and capitalize on the hype from Google I/O)
4. Release app
5. Profit
6. Set price to free after initial hype dies down to further open the in-app purchases market
7. Profit some more

If you read the angry app reviews, it’s quickly apparent that a lot of miffed users feel this was the plan all along. Android pirates would be a great scapegoat and if you don’t have to show your evidence, all the better.