[duey]

The OSVDB website contains no signup page for commercial access. No pricing either, purely sign up via contacting someone. From my experience whenever I see this, I just refuse to use the service and look elsewhere. Contacting someone is annoying and opens you up to repeat sales calls. Perhaps they should make commercial API access easier to access rather than complain about scrapers.

[lukejduncan]

It's not really reasonable to say "I don't like the way you market your goods... so you really shouldn't be concerned with people stealing them."

[johnhess]

I have to disagree. As creators, we should expect to see the behavior our designs encourage.

The fact is, if it's harder to buy something, would-be buyers choose another route.

Imagine something of trivial value that was very arduous to obtain. Say, the scores to last weekend's football game are only available via sending the NFL 2 cents taped onto a postcard then getting a user account and password back in the mail. Yes, you could apply for an account and who cares about the 2 cents? But most people wouldn't and who could blame them? There'd certainly be a market for pirated 'score data'.

But, if you just put ads on your site (the NFL does), voila! You make the same amount of money and people are happy to use your service. Netflix, Hulu, iTunes Store and Spotify all get this. If you make it a pain to do something, you can't feign surprise when everyone goes around you.

Is it legal to circumvent something just because it's arduous? No. Is it ethical? Not completely, but downloading pirated football scores wouldn't keep me from running for office.

[duey]

Not in the long term obviously, but you can't make a product extremely difficult to buy and then complain that everyone is taking the easy route.

[mehwoot]

Tell that to the 95% of the population on this site who torrent TV shows, movies and music.

[awor]

Did you read the article? In both cases the offending parties were told to contact RBS to obtain a proper license/account.

[kijin]

That's exactly the problem that GP is talking about.

McAfee were just being the usual assholes, but the first guy mentioned in the blog post could have been converted into a paying customer if the pricing scheme were clearly outlined on the web. Since "Contact us" account tiers are usually reserved for the very high end, he probably assumed that it would cost him an arm and a leg.

It shouldn't be too difficult to come up with a handful of moderately priced account tiers, each targeting a different type of customer, as well as an open-ended tier at the end ("Contact us") for those with special needs and deep pockets.