Slashdot Mirror
Grooveshark Co-founder Josh Greenberg Dead At 28
alphadogg writes: The tech startup world has been shaken today by news that 28-year-old Josh Greenberg, co-founder of recently defunct music sharing service Grooveshark, was found dead on Sunday in the Florida apartment he shared with his girlfriend. No foul play is suspected, but the local medical examiner is conducting an autopsy, according to the Gainesville Sun. Grooveshark was shut down in April after the company was threatened with legal action and possibly hundreds of millions in damages by several big music labels.
His mother, Lori Greenberg, told the paper that her son was in good health and that police had found no visible injuries or signs of drug use. Moreover, the local police department confirmed in a tweet that there was no evidence of foul play or suicide.
The actual overdose rates don't seem to support that on the surface, unless heroin is almost exclusively being used by healthy people, and cocaine is being used almost exclusively by physically frail individuals. http://www.drugabuse.gov/relat...
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Call it falacy if you want. I've written and sold software that made its way onto TPB and resulted directly in lost sales,
No doubt you got an F in high school economics.
In fact here's a little lesson: At my school, a student walked into the classroom saying that the soda machine was selling bottles (which were normally $1.50) for 5 cents. You know what happened? Basically the whole class went out to buy a soda. However if the price remained at $1.50, there wouldn't have been any increased sales; they would have simply done without.
This is a very basic economic concept called price elasticity. When something is free (aka your software) then the demand is much greater. However if the price is higher, then there's substantially less demand.
In simpler terms, if somebody didn't get your software for free, they would have simply gone without it anyways.
Now, that isn't to say that piracy doesn't negatively impact sales. It can, but not in the way you're thinking. Namely, one download isn't one lost sale. It's realistically much less than that, though how much less depends on the particular good.
For example, gasoline is something that is very inelastic. It pretty much doesn't matter how much it costs, people still tend to consume roughly the same amount of it, even when it goes up substantially.
However, in digital goods it tends to work more like this: The pirated copy may negatively impact the perceived value of a legitimate copy, but has virtually no negative impact on actual sales. Somebody might, for example, pirate a copy of your program, but then wait until it is offered at a discount before buying the real thing.
Now -- having said that -- a lot of software companies have taken advantage of this by offering special incentives for pirated users to go legit, and they usually do quite well with it. Although they made less than they would have if they had sold it at full price, they at least got some sales that they otherwise never would have had, so in the end it's a much more profitable proposition than had those users just done without entirely.