Howard Marks memo ( Oaktree Capital Management)
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I really like this guy's view on things, but I have to say, on tarriffs, leadership in China needs to stop thinking it can eat its cake and have it too. It is painful in the short term, but China needs to be more open. I have a bunch of people using my software in China who I know have ripped out the DRM. Nowhere else in the world. This kind of mentality prevents me from putting any effort into any requests I get with Chinese characters in the name.
Baron
ET Founder
How exactly are they doing that? Seems to defeat the purpose of having DRM to begin with.
I don't have a million man-years to spend on DRM, so I bought one of the more technically savvy ones that isn't using easily defeated encryption or simple file-based mechanism. It's not easy to defeat (and sometimes has false positives, which bugs me), but the only way to defeat it permanently is to patch the binary, which I randomize lightly. The way I know it's only the Chinese is that my analytics tells me who is using past their trial end date without an associated license.
Is it possible that I am wrong? Sure.
I have a friend who sells software for ~$100K/pop and he said the Chinese government approached him for support. Only problem: he never sold it to them.
I should mention that all the sites that have "cracks" are Russian, but Russians are big customers. If China was more like Russia in that sense, I would be less antagonistic but seriously, something (non-violent) needs to be done IMO.
Baron
ET Founder
Ok, gotcha. I was wondering how you knew which people were trying to circumvent the rules.
Read about Huawei and the T-mobile robot. It’s comical.
Exactly. This is what they do. It's not acceptable.
@nooby_mcnoob So the Chinese have beaten you. They are more technically savvy then the publishers of your DRM. They clearly have the cake and are eating it.
I hear you on IP, but trying to get them to pay in a situation you have clearly lost seems pointless. Why not discriminate and sell to the Chinese market support or value adds?
I hear you on IP, but trying to get them to pay in a situation you have clearly lost seems pointless. Why not discriminate and sell to the Chinese market support or value adds?