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  3. Piracy is generally bad for business. It can undermine sales of legitimate products, deprive a company of its valuable intellect

Piracy is generally bad for business. It can undermine sales of legitimate products, deprive a company of its valuable intellect

admin2014-03-22  63
问题     Piracy is generally bad for business. It can undermine sales of legitimate products, deprive a company of its valuable intellectual property and tarnish its brand.
    That principle is worth defending. Yet companies have to deal with the real world — and, despite the best efforts of companies, piracy has proved very hard to stop. Given that a certain amount of stealing is going to happen anyway, some companies are turning it to their advantage.
    For example, around 20 times as many music tracks are exchanged over the Internet on "peer to peer" file-sharing networks as are legitimately sold online or in shops. Statistics about the traffic on file-sharing networks can be useful. They can reveal, for example, the countries where a new singer is most popular, even before his album has been released there.
    In other industries, piracy can help to open up new markets. Officially, the software giant has taken a firm line against piracy. But unofficially, it admits that tolerating piracy of its products has given it huge market share and will boost revenues in the long term, because users stick with Microsoft’s products when they go legit. "It’s easier for our software to compete with Linux when there’s piracy than when there’s not," Microsoft’s chairman Bill Gates told Fortune magazine last year.
    Piracy can also be a source of innovation, if someone takes a product and then modifies it in a popular way. In a recent book, The Pirate’s Dilemma, Matt Mason gives the example of Nigo, a Japanese designer who took Air Force 1 trainers made by Nike, removed the famous "swoosh" logo, applied his own designs and then sold the resulting shoes in limited editions at $300 a pair under his own label, A Bathing Ape. Instead of suing Nigo, Nike realised that he had spotted a gap in the market. It took a stake in his firm and also launched its own premium "remixes" of its trainers.
    That this silver lining exists should not obscure the cloud. Most of the time, companies will decide to combat piracy of their products by sending in the lawyers with all guns blazing. And most of the time that is the right thing to do. But before they rush into action companies should check to see if there is a way for them to turn piracy to their advantage.
What does Bill Gates think of piracy of their products?
选项 A、He firmly objects to it.
B、The pirated software is unsafe.
C、Piracy should be tolerated.
D、It can benefit his company.
答案D
解析 根据题干中的Bill Gates将本题出处定位于第4段。该段最后一句引用了比尔·盖茨的话： “盗版使我们的软件同Linux的竞争变得更加有利。”由此可以看出，他认为盗版对公司是有一定好处的。故D)为答案，同时可排除A)。B)原文没有提到，C)过于绝对。
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