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Is Piracy In the Consumers' Best Interests?
moviemodel writes "Warner Home Video in China are beginning trials of 'simple pack' DVD releases at $1.50. They state they are doing this as a test to see if they can recover a market lost to pirate DVD's at 75c each. They also sell higher priced and more complete DVD sets as 'silver' and 'gold' packs. Maybe this marks the beginning of movie industry realism and long hoped for shift in business models, forced by piracy. Perhaps they can take it on as a better model for movie downloads worldwide, facing the same problem of competition from pirated movies. Is such a model viable in the long term?"
Man, you slashdotters are all the same. First, it was all "read the article, read the article, blah blah blah, rtfm", and now it's "read the summary, rtfs". I bet next you'll be wanting people to read the entire headline before posting! Well, good sir, from now on, I fully intend on just glazing over the keywords of the summary, maybe one or two of the works in the links, and then posting the first thing that comes to my mind!
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
Every time you pirate a movie, the studios lose the cost of that movie. If the movie costs $20 then they lose $20, and if it costs $30, then they lose $30. They know they can't possibly compete with free, so they're doing the best they possibly can to reduce their losses. By only charging $1.50 for each copy, this will cut their piracy losses considerably even if they don't sell any.
Yes, it's almost as if you could draw two intersecting lines. One line would represent the number of units people would demand as the price increases. The other would represent the number that manufacturers would be willing to supply as the price decreases. I wonder what it would mean when those two lines intersected.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
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Oh great, another dupe...