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Do you use pirated software?
Thread poster: Emma Goldsmith
Erik Freitag
Erik Freitag  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 14:12
Member (2006)
Dutch to German
+ ...
Not a question of East or West Jun 29, 2014

Frankie JB wrote:

2) If you want to assume that my dummy Pakistani web designer then sells his services cheaper, then allow me to assume that his local competitors do the same because they also use pirated copies, for the good reason that it would take them 15 years of saving to buy a full Adobe suite.

I find it very irritating to witness such an amount of Western-centrism from a professional.


I fail to see how my point has something to do with Western-centrism. I assume you suggest that while it is immoral and illegal to use pirated software in First-World-countries, citiziens of developing countries should be judged by lower moral/legal standards? Maybe they should, but then they should also be absolved for stealing cars in order to open a taxi service.

Your argument features prominently in the list of rationalizations quoted in an earlier post. The fact that it would take somebody 15 years of saving up to buy some software surely can be a reason for theft/illegal use of pirated software or whatever term you wish to use, but it certainly isn't a good reason.


[Bearbeitet am 2014-06-29 18:55 GMT]


 
Dan Lucas
Dan Lucas  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 13:12
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
You want a pat on the head instead? Jun 29, 2014

Lincoln Hui wrote:
Much good it does Microsoft if people are using Linux in lieu of pirating Windows, which is why Microsoft's efforts at combating piracy have always been half-hearted to say the least.
I'm not even going bother with the issue of your average user fumbling with Linux and trying to find appropriate software for it. It's one thing to take the moral high ground, but much good it does when the victims you jihad over are less than enthusiastic about the cause.

[Edited at 2014-06-29 11:35 GMT]

It's not a question of helping Microsoft. It's a broader question of supporting the rule of law and supporting civic society. If you have made a decision to use pirated software nobody here can stop you, just don't expect us to condone it.

The key points remain the same. There are other careers open to you and there are other software packages available to you, including free CAT tools.


 
Enrico C - ECLC
Enrico C - ECLC  Identity Verified
Taiwan
Local time: 21:12
English to Italian
+ ...
To moderator Jun 30, 2014

Enrico C - ECLC wrote:

Shamelessly, i must admit that as a young translator, Trados aside, the rest was completely pirated. The reasons are obvious, setting up a full platform with original software would have meant investing a lot of money i didn't want to risk for a job that hadn't picked up yet.

Now i pay for everything i buy but avoid anything with "yearly" subscriptions if i can avoid. I feel very uneasy about using tools like Office paying a yearly fee. At the same time i find some software very overpriced.


Would you kindly mind changing my title into "Before yes, now no". That should have been the right one. Thanks in advance.

Enrico


 
Emma Goldsmith
Emma Goldsmith  Identity Verified
Spain
Local time: 14:12
Member (2004)
Spanish to English
TOPIC STARTER
Poll results Jul 3, 2014

Thanks for a lively discussion, everyone!

Poll results, after 10 days and 160 votes, show that about 20% of translators use pirated programs and, happily, the vast majority are above board. More detailed results here:

http://signsandsymptomsoftranslation.com/2014/06/23/pirated-trados/#pd_a_8140924

Of course, the sample
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Thanks for a lively discussion, everyone!

Poll results, after 10 days and 160 votes, show that about 20% of translators use pirated programs and, happily, the vast majority are above board. More detailed results here:

http://signsandsymptomsoftranslation.com/2014/06/23/pirated-trados/#pd_a_8140924

Of course, the sample size is very small, but for me, at least, the poll results and the discussion here have been quite an eye opener.
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Preston Decker
Preston Decker  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 09:12
Chinese to English
If you took an 'honest' poll in china your results would be reversed Jul 3, 2014

Poll results would be 80 percent or higher for using pirated software if you took this poll in China. In 4+ years of living here, including working in multiple schools, a company, and for multiple domestic translation clients, I can only think of a handful of people I ve encountered who I can say with decent certainty use non-pirated software for their work-related tasks. In fact, I m not even sure that many people know for sure what kind of software they re using, though I do think that most o... See more
Poll results would be 80 percent or higher for using pirated software if you took this poll in China. In 4+ years of living here, including working in multiple schools, a company, and for multiple domestic translation clients, I can only think of a handful of people I ve encountered who I can say with decent certainty use non-pirated software for their work-related tasks. In fact, I m not even sure that many people know for sure what kind of software they re using, though I do think that most of them don't spend a great amount of time trying to figure this out. As painful as it may be for some to hear, for many people here, there is either ABSOLUTELY nothing morally wrong with using pirated software or this is simply not a problem they think about ( and the same goes for some long term expats here).

This is a cultural issue. I do agree that using pirated software is morally wrong IF your upbringing has caused you to believe it s morally wrong, but not necessarily so if you've had a different upbringing, and yes, that does make sense, I think. Or rather that is too say that some morals are not universal but individual.If anyone remembers, many Americans were confused about similar issues back in the days of napster.

To put it another way, most westerners don t think twice about going to view China's Silk Road treasures in European museums, whereas there are many here who find the fact that these have not been returned yet, and that they continue to make money for their museums ninety years after their theft, to be morally abhorrent.

And we haven t even started to get into question of whether the WTO's anti-piracy and copyright laws are very moral.

So I'll put in a weak vote for using pirated software being morally wrong TO ME, and a stronger vote for using pirated technology being potentially dangerous in terms of security, while also noting that I have a strong suspicion that the results of the poll do not accurately reflect the true degree to which translators worldwide use pirated technology.

My apologies for the lack of apostrophes, blame it on my (definitely not pirated) ipad.

[Edited at 2014-07-03 18:21 GMT]
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Arianne Farah
Arianne Farah  Identity Verified
Canada
Local time: 09:12
Member (2008)
English to French
Pirated anything - do I want to support the product? Jul 4, 2014

A long time ago, I took a University Christian ethics class where we were introduced to 'levels of good'. The final exam question essay question was "You return a piece of furniture to a store, after receiving the receipt for the refund to your credit card, you notice it is 2000$ more than what you had paid, do you return the money?" In a nutshell I argued that if it was a mom & pop shop, or if the mistake was made manually by a teller who might be held responsible for it rather than a faulty ba... See more
A long time ago, I took a University Christian ethics class where we were introduced to 'levels of good'. The final exam question essay question was "You return a piece of furniture to a store, after receiving the receipt for the refund to your credit card, you notice it is 2000$ more than what you had paid, do you return the money?" In a nutshell I argued that if it was a mom & pop shop, or if the mistake was made manually by a teller who might be held responsible for it rather than a faulty bar code, I would return the money; but if it had been an automatic problem at a huge chain store then the advantage to me as a poor student (the level of good it brought to me) greatly outweighed the disadvantage of a multinational and I would keep the money. (I finished the class with an A

What I'm trying to say is that morality is fluid and understanding it is key to applying it : stealing a bicycle is wrong because the advantage I would gain from having the bicycle would be less than the disadvantage of the person from whom the bicycle was taken who would have to deal with not only the loss of the value of bicycle, but also the feeling of vulnerability/betrayal in addition to the time lost replacing the item.

Stealing software by downloading a version where copyright protection has been removed does not come with those same implications - when you pirate software/books/movies your gain (the money you haven't spent) is equal to the loss of the entity you're stealing from (the money they would have made if you had bought the digital product). In the absence of laws, most people would choose themselves over a company. The best way to fight piracy is probably to engage people in the product (think kickstarter, indiegogo) rather than try to prosecute which has been an epic fail so far - the loss of company reputation far outweighs the gain from those who were 'scared straight'. Television, movies and games have moved to streaming and software is moving to the cloud - the days of piracy will soon be over, but not because of laws or morality, but because the products being sold will have evolved.

For example, I also live in China where to see movies/TV I can either buy a pirated DVD on the street or download for free off the Internet. I never buy the pirated software because it's rife with malware and spyware... this is China after all. If I want to listen to music, say streaming on Pandora, I have to launch my VPN which is technically stealing since the ads they play are lost being played on me. It used to be that if I wanted to read comic books I had to download them too, but this site : www.comixology.com came up and I now pay for all my comic books because I want them to keep making them. For French comics I had a membership to www.izneo.com that lapsed because it was impractical (15 books a month rented for 10 days each - too much for working months, too little for vacations); when they revamped the membership to be unlimited I signed back up and left a word on their facebook page telling them their new policy had brought at least one old subscriber back to the fold. This is how you get a pirate to become a consumer - it's more practical for me to buy the digital books than locate, download, archive and store downloaded comics - I have over 6000 comics - all in the cloud and available on my computer, my phone and my ipad at the touch of a button - all organized by series and story line. Same goes for buying a book on my kindle - 1click purchase is soooooo practical - I could save 5-20$ by going online and searching for a torrent, then converting and uploading the book but I'm a lazy woman and at the end of the day it's a medium I want to encourage (did you know that Terry Goodking of Sword of Truth fame self-published a book though amazon, bypassing his publisher altogether, and priced it, new, at around half the price of what his book would have otherwise been since he's a best-selling author - it make you WANT to pay for the book, because you're paying the author himself, the person who is giving you the enjoyment you get from reading the book, and you want him to keep working).

By engaging consumers and changing product sales models, piracy will disappear and only old pirated software will remain...

Now for your enjoyment, go watch this guy sing a wonderfully insightful and irreverent spoof of Disney music and princesses : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diU70KshcjA ... If you like it drop him a dollar in itunes and encourage him to keep going - this is the future - we are today's Nielsen boxes
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Giles Watson
Giles Watson  Identity Verified
Italy
Local time: 14:12
Italian to English
In memoriam
Strictly for the birds Jul 5, 2014

Arianne Farah wrote:

In a nutshell I argued that if it was a mom & pop shop, or if the mistake was made manually by a teller who might be held responsible for it rather than a faulty bar code, I would return the money; but if it had been an automatic problem at a huge chain store then the advantage to me as a poor student (the level of good it brought to me) greatly outweighed the disadvantage of a multinational and I would keep the money. (I finished the class with an A

What I'm trying to say is that morality is fluid



Ah, the utilitarian "sum of human happiness" argument.

Whichever way you chop it, though, the act you describe is theft. Mitigating circumstances can alter perceptions of the theft's gravity but theft it remains. If you want to get out of this, you're going to have to go the whole hog and invoke Proudhon - la propriété c'est la vol - or perhaps Birdman - le vol c'est une propriété des oiseaux .


 
Artem Vakhitov
Artem Vakhitov  Identity Verified
Kyrgyzstan
English to Russian
+ ...
No, I don't Oct 17, 2014

I don't use pirated software, even though buying software is still kind of exotic where I live — and despite the fact I'm generally sceptical about the whole copyright thing.

 
Olivia Bravo
Olivia Bravo
Local time: 07:12
English to Spanish
+ ...
Samuel Murray -- The best comment I've read so far. May 25, 2016

One should never admit to using pirated software. It is unprofessional to admit to it. It is also unprofessional to use it, but the important point is not that you not should use it, but that you shouldn't openly admit to it and you certainly should not brag about it. Why? Because you never know when you might meet a client who doesn't think about it the way you do. And that could hurt your business and your online reputation.
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It’s only f
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One should never admit to using pirated software. It is unprofessional to admit to it. It is also unprofessional to use it, but the important point is not that you not should use it, but that you shouldn't openly admit to it and you certainly should not brag about it. Why? Because you never know when you might meet a client who doesn't think about it the way you do. And that could hurt your business and your online reputation.
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It’s only fair. I don’t translate for free (except when I choose to) and I don’t expect software companies to work for me for free either.
- Not a fair comparison. You don't sell copies of your translation to multiple clients.

Help keep down the price of the software. The less translators use pirated copies of a program, the less expensive it will be for the rest of us.
- I have never seen evidence of software companies reducing prices because they managed to reduce piracy.

Get support for any issues that might crop up.
- You get free support from a variety of sources anyway (forums, mailing lists, etc.)

Get access to upgrades with new features.
- You get access to upgrades with new features if you're using pirated software, too. It just takes a little while longer for you to get it. And the new features are seldom deal-breakers.

Pay for your software and decrease your taxable income. Investing in hardware, software and continuing professional development (conferences, webinars) is a win-win situation.
- The less you spend, the money money you have. The more money you have, the more tax you pay. Yes, but if you spend less, you'll end up with more money than if you had spent a lot.

Don’t risk infecting your work machine with malware.
- Virtual machine. Spare laptop. Sandboxing software.

Keep a clear conscience.
- The most amazing thing about people doing stuff that they shouldn't is that they usually find a way to justify it to themselves.



[Edited at 2014-06-23 21:08 GMT] [/quote]

This, this, this, this, this, and this. I agree with all of this post.

It is unprofessional to use and admit to using pirated software, so it is completely useless to ask someone if they do it, in order to 'impose' some kind of ethics on the translation trade, especially when the ethics on the software side of the trade are not equally applied.

What I do is avoid agencies who ask to use TRADOS specifically (unless, of course, it is an in-house project and I will be provided with the software) because 1.-)it is very expensive, 2.-)those agencies do not pay the extra value of having an original software -as one should have-, and -on the contrary- 3.-)they use it as a tool for paying less to the translator via the percent-matches, so it would be a win-lose situation against me.

[Editado a las 2016-05-25 21:43 GMT]
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Rolf Keller
Rolf Keller
Germany
Local time: 14:12
English to German
Simple truths should be thought through, esp if they sound demanding May 27, 2016

Olivia Bravo wrote:

but the important point is not that you not should use it, but that you shouldn't openly admit to it and you certainly should not brag about it. Why? Because you never know when you might meet a client who doesn't think about it the way you do.


"Steal & cheat wherever you want – provided that nobody is watching you"? Any other points are less important?

BTW, YOU might meet a client who has read your above statement ...

I have never seen evidence of software companies reducing prices because they managed to reduce piracy.


Razor-sharp thought. Just to enlighten you on software development: Any development costs MUCH money. The manpower that has been put into e. g. MS Windows can be measured in several thousand years. So MS obviously reduced that huge sum to a tiny price of, say, 50 $, because MS managed to establish anti-piracy means.

"Don’t risk infecting your work machine with malware."
- Virtual machine. Spare laptop. Sandboxing software.


Put another way: Use a scenario that is rather useless for professional work.

Or do you think, e. q. a ransom software isn't able to encrypt document files in directories you are just working with?

And how do you exchange files with your clients? Use an USB stick and transport the files to/from a different real or virtual machine?

The protection measures you mentioned are suitable to guard your online banking actions, though.


 
Mirko Mainardi
Mirko Mainardi  Identity Verified
Italy
Local time: 14:12
Member
English to Italian
Indeed Sep 5, 2016

Riccardo Schiaffino wrote:

I’d like to add that I find it amazing that professional translators would think that a USD 700 license (equivalent to maybe two days of earnings for a moderately successful translator) is “too expensive”.


Indeed, I wholeheartedly agree. A "moderately successful translator" earning $7-8k per month (or more) should definitely not be pirating any kind of software


 
Paulette Romero
Paulette Romero  Identity Verified
Colombia
Local time: 08:12
English to Spanish
+ ...
Moderately successful? Oct 24, 2016

Mirko Mainardi wrote:

Riccardo Schiaffino wrote:

I’d like to add that I find it amazing that professional translators would think that a USD 700 license (equivalent to maybe two days of earnings for a moderately successful translator) is “too expensive”.


Indeed, I wholeheartedly agree. A "moderately successful translator" earning $7-8k per month (or more) should definitely not be pirating any kind of software


I would hardly call someone making $7000 USD per month "moderately successful." I would call that "laughing all the way to the bank." C'mon now... perhaps a translator with 20 years of experience makes that much but I can assure you that most of us do not.

I'm of the opinion that translators who live in developing nations should be given a break. I am not suggesting that it is ok to pirate software, but people need to make a living. What if someone in Bangladesh is an amazing English-Bengali translator, but unfortunately due to low wages and family commitments he cannot afford to purchase a license for memoQ or Trados? Should he be made to suffer and potentially live in poverty because of this? I think not. There are many people around the world who need to make a living. Obviously pirating software is wrong but I'm willing to look the other way if it means this person can provide for their family and send their kids to school.


Philip Ivanov
Mariusz Bansleben
Ramón Esquivel
Craig Thomas Smith
 
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