{"id":10997,"date":"2015-04-08T10:15:32","date_gmt":"2015-04-08T14:15:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=10997"},"modified":"2018-08-22T21:30:34","modified_gmt":"2018-08-23T01:30:34","slug":"mac-app-store-licensing-and-copy-protection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2015\/04\/08\/mac-app-store-licensing-and-copy-protection\/","title":{"rendered":"Mac App Store Licensing and Copy Protection"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gus Mueller<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I’m seeing 40x more downloads than purchases. Hello massive pirating.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s been happening for years.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Cabel Sasser<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Yeah, easy as pie. One username\/password shared. As if I needed another reason to hesitate from the MAS…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ian Meyer<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

My girlfriend’s workplace uses a single MAS account to make purchases for hundreds of users. She’s trying to change that.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Jason Snell<\/a> (in 2011):<\/p>\n

When you buy an app on the Mac App Store, you’re getting the rights to run that program on any Macs you own and operate, for your personal use. Basically, if your household has a half-dozen different Macs, including desktops and laptops, you can buy a copy of Gratuitous Space Battles and play it on every single one of them. Consider a purchase of consumer software via the Mac App Store to be a bit like buying a household site license for the app.<\/p>\n

The situation is slightly different for apps that are considered commercial or professional in nature. For apps that fall into this category—Aperture’s a good example—the Mac App Store license says that you essentially can install that item on computers you use or on a single computer shared by multiple people. Basically think of it as a one-seat license for a pro app.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

There’s no authorizing or deauthorizing of Macs, like you do with iTunes media. There’s no five-Mac limit, or device limit of any kind. […] Beyond entering in your Apple ID and password, this is all on the honor system.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It seems like Apple should be able to solve this problem rather easily. It already has a system to keep track of which devices are authorized to play media files. This could<\/em> have been a reason to<\/em> sell in the Mac App Store, because a FairPlay system would be both secure and easy to use. But Apple doesn’t really sell software anymore, so it probably doesn’t see this as much of a problem. And developers are not breathing down its neck the way the record labels were.<\/p>\n

Enforcement aside, Apple isn’t even trying very hard to communicate how the honor system is intended to work. Alastair Houghton<\/a>:<\/p>\n

To be fair, it’s far from obvious how businesses are supposed to handle purchases from MAS.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are no links from the App Store front pages, and no obvious indication what to do.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Normally<\/em> businesses buy the same way as consumers and don’t need to use a special channel.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Apple should be more pro-active; right now, it’s costing developers quite a lot of lost revenue I expect.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Update (2015-04-09): There is further discussion on Twitter<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gus Mueller: I’m seeing 40x more downloads than purchases. Hello massive pirating. It’s been happening for years. Cabel Sasser: Yeah, easy as pie. One username\/password shared. As if I needed another reason to hesitate from the MAS… Ian Meyer: My girlfriend’s workplace uses a single MAS account to make purchases for hundreds of users. She’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2018-08-23T01:30:36Z","apple_news_api_id":"140853d8-fe90-4f6c-8985-2a93567af926","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2018-08-23T01:30:38Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/AFAhT2P6QT2yJhSqTVnr5Jg","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[114,101,30,39],"class_list":["post-10997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-aperture","tag-business","tag-mac","tag-macappstore"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10997"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10997\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11017,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10997\/revisions\/11017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}