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RIAA vs The Economy
thumbtack writes "Boycott-RIAA.com is running an analysis
of the RIAA sales vs a number of other large corporations. It was compiled by
Justin
Moore at Duke University. It is really quite interesting, showing the the
RIAA sales are pretty much consistent with the rest of the economy. From the analysis:
I would assert, however that it does make the case in cold, hard numbers that
the RIAA's claim of digital piracy ravaging their sales must be taken with a rather
large grain of salt. The CEOs of Eastman-Kodak are in a nearly identical economic
situation as the RIAA, yet do not have the luxury of blaming digital piracy."
"and dupont can blame mental patient founders"
They actually tried that before and succeeded.
The war on pot started as a gift to DuPont to stop hemp from competing with their new product: plastic.
>those gigs of MP3s are all STOLEN PROPERTY.
Most of my MP3 collection is music I wrote and recorded myself.
Sorry, but you aren't stealing. You are infringing on someone's copyright. There is a big difference. People like you merely obfuscate the issue by trying to conflate the two terms.
UVa Computer Science
-jdm
I keep hoping that some well-run online song-for-song "rights buying" project comes up...I personally would pay a moderate amount for downloadable music, especially on a song-by-song basis.
Jesus, nobody told you? The Windows version will be out by year's end. And Roxio is planning a clone under a familiar name. Probably others will follow. It's a race to Windows with this model.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
You CANNOT compete with someone taking YOUR PRODUCT and giving it away for free.
These guys think they can make a good living by giving away THEIR OWN PRODUCT for free, AND by allowing people to give it to others as well. As it turns out, they're doing very well at it, too.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I dunno...I like my digital camera. It's a Kodak DC3200 and it's been going strong for two years. It uses CF cards which are dirt cheap and have no DRM features. Sure, it's a megapixel camera in a time when multi-megapixel is the norm. And it eats batteries like the Cookie Monster eats cookies. But it works for me.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I'm going to try to reply to both of the above posts (santos's and dyoo's).
For starters, the market for pre-recorded CDs is nowhere near perfectly competitive. But this only applies to the big 5's ability to manipulate prices in their market, over which the FTC recently took them to court.
Second, the issue of rivalry and exclusivity refers to the CD as an object. It is rival in that if I purchase it you cannot also purchase it (though we may purchase it and listen to it together). It is excludable in that the seller can keep you from getting the good without paying for it. The issue is not whether or not you can get your own copy, but whether any one copy of the CD is rival and/or exclusive.
The classic example of a public good (non-rival, non-exclusive) is a lighthouse. As the lighthouse gives off light, any one ship taking advantage of that light does not take anything away from anyone else using it (non-rival), and the operator of the lighthouse has no means by which to exclude any one individual from taking advantage of the light (non-exclusive). A CD in no way fits this description. And there are no markets, perfectly competitive or not, for public goods.
Just a little econ lesson from an econ prof.
Just from an economist's point of view....
I briefly scanned through your analysis and my immediate comments were these:
(i) You are grouping very disparate industries. There is no reason to think that some of them ought to behave similarly no matter the economic conditions. For instance, in some other post someone compared the decrease in sales of CDs to the decrease in sales of cars. This is a ridiculous comparison as autos are a durable good and CDs are not, autos costs tens of thousands of dollars while CDs tend to cost less than 20 dollars, etc etc. Likewise, there is no reason to think one ought to compare the RIAA companies to GM, GE, Citibank, Merck, and Dupont (just to grab a few names).
(ii) Nowhere in here is there an estimation of what actually affects the demand for pre-recorded CDs. That demand estimation is what really needs to be done to get a better understanding of how much piracy affects the RIAA's profits. That way you could ask the truly relevant question: "How much would RIAA's profits be if there were no piracy?"
Valiant effort though. And I have to say that the kind of analysis I'm talking about is beyond me as well, really. Although I'll have to do a little searching to see if anyone else has done it.
Random links about the amount of pesticides and herbicides used, and don't forget that 85% of california's water is used for irrigating crops. Cotton is *not* an easy plant to grow. Compare with hemp (called weed for a reason) which grows 4x as fast as your typical pulp-producing trees with no pesticides and herbicides, and you have a pretty convincing product.
There are quite a few places growing hemp commercially in the UK, even with all the regulatory hoops they have to jump through (fencing requirements to keep "pot-heads" from getting ahold of something with no THC content).
Do a little research before trolling next time?